Scar Flowers (29 page)

Don
’t give in and ruin it . . .
Faith’s wig slid off, and her heavy jacket, creaking and jingling, was lost somehow. She drew him in every time she retreated, pulled him closer while looking the other way. Every time he started to push her away, her body yielded, and his gesture became something else, possessive.

When he started this, it had felt like a plan. He had intended to go slowly, but found there was nothing to savor or explore—she was not the thing he craved. Neither was there anything to hold him back.

The buttons on her well-worn jeans parted, and under them she was naked, her smooth sex a sweet-and-sour contradiction of plump, wrinkled flesh, like a pitted winter apricot. He could not avoid thinking of Leah having touched this same part of Faith too.

Simon did not recall picking the girl up or walking with her, but there they were, collided with the wall, while he supported her weight, his fingers sunk into the plushness of her. Her arms closed around his head, her breasts pressed against him, small and pointed: a reminder, a warning. A picture rattled in its frame and tapped the wall in time to the refrain they were pounding out:
ruin, it, ruin, it, ruin, it
. Everything in the room, down to the pattern on the wallpaper, had led them to this, and now even he could see where they were going. He followed her soon after, taken by the look on her face, her indrawn breath. She gripped his shoulders and hooked one foot back against his leg to pull him closer.

Everything stopped except the sound of their breathing. There would be time to think about this. Soon, once his brain cleared. A face filled his field of vision, a mouth spoke to him:
I have to go, I can’t stay
. Then Faith slipped away, to collect her coat and wig. They were strangers again, but not quite. He offered her a ride, and she surprised him by saying yes as she opened the door. Quickly, as if they were running a race.

This time he drove her in his rental car, not wanting to enter that clinging stance with her on the bike again. He dropped her off across the street from Leah’s house. She
squeezed his hand and left, did not answer when he said her name and did not look back.

Afterward,
at his house, he opened the front door on the quiet rooms: a glass of water on the coffee table and a spent condom on the floor. Signs of Leah’s ghost. She leaned over his shoulder, whispered in his ear as he tried to piece the last two hours together with what he already knew. What did he know? He had been blind again.

Should I give you to one of them? If so, which one?

He knew now which one.

Friday, September 22, 10:52 a.m.

Simon
woke to his cell phone ringing. He groped for it without raising his head from the pillow.

“What.” The bathtub-sized brown stain on the ceiling came slowly into focus. He lifted the shade and peered out at a
gray morning. His head felt full of lava.

“Cob
bster! Rise and shine.”

Simon grunted and propped himself on his elbows. Empty beer bottles littered the floor
by his mattress.

“’Sup?” Tom sounded jolly but his voice was rough
.

“Oh, you know. Sucking dicks and screwing young girls.”

“That’s Hollywood for ya. Where are you, man?”

“Reclining on
four thousand dollars’ worth of fine linens at the center of the world. Seattle. Not Hollywood.”

He had not gone back to the studio to retrieve the sheets, but it was the last clear thing he could remember of a day he had worked all night to forget. Simon felt through the empties on the floor. In the middle of last night’s drinking binge
, after he dropped Faith off, he had thought that he had an idea for a film, but this morning there appeared to be not a single coherent idea among the scribbles on the notepad.

At the hiss of the cap coming off Simon’s beer, Tom said, “Dude, you startin’ without me?”

“I am indeed about to enjoy a refreshing malt beverage.” Simon took a swig and belched. The room, filled with a night’s worth of his breath, smelled sour, curdled. “Hair of the bitch.”

“Don’t make me come out there to save your lousy ass,” said Tom. “It’s my turn next, not yours.”

“Yeah. All right. I am
all right
. This ain’t a hangover, innit, because I’m still drunk. What d’you want?”
Innit.
There he went, talking Indian.

“I’m returning your message, man. I got the cash you sent.”

“Oh. That. Blood money. Wear it in good health.” Simon scratched his stomach and considered the ceiling. “Where are you?”

“Vegas. Me and four of my closest friends.” Whoops and
war cries sounded in the background.

“Vegas? You get married? To your fisherman.”

“No such luck. Frisco was not my city of destiny. I gotta feeling that could change today. Laddie Luck.”

Simon pictured a Motel 6 off some desert highway, drunken drifters passed out on the floor. Tom, when he came into money, hooked up with whichever buddy had a car that ran, and they would road trip until the cash was gone. If things were rosy, the trip could stretch into weeks, but if Tom were in one of his funks
, he could go through dollars like they were molecules of oxygen, grains of sand. Usually these lost-weekend endeavors involved picking up hitchhikers and stopping at bars and restaurants, with “all drinks on Uncle Packer.”

“I’m not sending any
more money.” Simon’s head pounded. He touched his closed eyes to make sure they were not about to pop out of his skull. “You’ll have to take a bus back if you get into trouble.”

“Not your problem, Cob
b. But you owe me a lucky number. I’m collecting from all my friends before we hit the slots.” There was a clunk as though Tom had dropped the phone, and someone in the background giggled.

Slots.
Gearing up for a binge, then.

Years ago, Tom had been jilted by a lover and disappeared three days before he was supposed to go out on a new fishing vessel. His friends found him a week later in someone’s hunting cabin in the woods. The big man had smashed the front window to get in, then raided the pantry and passed out in the living room next to the wood stove, one boot on and one still clutched in his hand. “Damn fool thing to do,” Tom had grumbled later, “keeping a perfectly good cabin locked like that.”

“Lucky number. Four,” said Simon. “Put that bus fare in your sock and don’t spend it. You got a place?”

“Nope.”

“You can crash here.”

“Sure. Yeah. I’m fine, Ma Cob
b. No worries about Uncle Tom.” Tom laughed. “Okay. Gotta go.”

“Yeah, well. If you need a place
. . .”

“With your activities on satin sheets over there, I don’t wanna interrupt anything. You don’t have one of your white girls shacked up with you?”

“No one here except myself,” said Simon. “Except myself, except myself, except myself.”

Accept myself.

“Don’t forget your tribe, Cob
b. Your people. They ain’t in Hollywood.”

“
Seattle. And I don’t have a fucking tribe. Anyone ever explain to you what Métis means?”

“Hey, you were the one who used to lecture me about Louis Riel and the Manitoba Act back in high school.”
He cleared his throat, then came the click of what might have been a window latch, and he spit. “
You
used to know it meant mixed. And all that means is that white people have been screwing Indians for two hundred years. That ain’t no secret, ain’t no surprise.”

“Sure. Later
.” Simon turned the phone off and tossed it aside.

Two more pulls at the bottle and he sat up. Last night
returned without prompting: the sensation of entering Faith’s body because he had wanted it for that moment, for his own relief. Because she was the closest thing to being with Leah. Did Faith think she was in love with him? He knew nothing about the girl beyond certain facts and details. The way she had wiped her lipstick off on the inside of her wrist before she kissed him, a quick, habitual gesture; her foot hooked around his thigh as her breath hissed in his ear and her fingers clenched into fists.

The voice in his head had come
back. It lured him into the shower with Angel, and no sooner had his mind recalled the moment than a nausea of fear bloomed in him, like a drop of ink bursting in a glass of water. The grip of strong hands against the sides of his head to pull him forward. Water falling as he knelt, and a faint hint of musk, strange yet familiar. Leah’s voice in his ear, telling him to suck. And he had, as if he had always known how. He told himself then that he was just obeying Leah, but hadn’t he always been curious? There had been a kiss, too, something he had not been forced into—a bristly pressure on his lips that formed a Siamese twin composed of male slaves, punctuated by the weird thrust of a stranger’s tongue. Equally matched bodies grappling for the same thing.
Two-spirit
, his mother called them: men who slept with men, women who loved women. Shamans, transvestites, hermaphrodites, gays. But they had a place in native society as . . . what was it Leah had called him? Conduits. Connected to the spirit world. Maybe she was right—he had chosen to play Sebastian, hadn’t he?

If only Tom knew, how he would laugh. Or maybe not. The night they met at a kegger in the woods, both of them pissing into the passenger window of a wrecked car at the bottom of a ravine, Tom had propositioned him. Simon said no—
of course you knew, the whole town knew he was gay, what were you doing with him at the ravine?
—and Tom had shrugged and made it a joke as they returned to the party. Ultimately it had cemented their friendship, the fact that Tom was who he was without giving a damn and for the most part let others be who they were. But there had been an awkward few weeks after—should they kick the crap out of each other or just forget it and move on?

You see? It’s always been in you
.
At some point, he would be able to ignore the voice in his head (
faggot! whore!
) because it sounded so much like the ones he had become immune to: the do-gooders, the upholders of the Will of the Tribe. But not now. It reminded him of the blindfolded girl at the hotel where he and his actors had stayed years ago, the one he had recalled during his first session as Leah’s house.

Liar. Liar, the way you like to remember it. Admit the rest.
The girl’s T-shirt, pale green with blue flowers, had been pulled up over her head by Simon’s lead actor—the first star he had ever worked with. His first big project; he thought he had finally made it on that film, convincing a box-office name to be in his project. The lead actor’s collection of acquaintances circled her, poking and probing her with fingers, ballpoint pens, fruit from a gift basket sent by a fan. Most of them weren’t that motivated, having already picked up, enjoyed, and dismissed their company for the night, but they made comments and gave commands. The girl’s head swiveled as she tried to choose which one to obey, afraid to make a mistake and lose her place among her gods.

And what did you do?
the voice insisted. Simon had left the room, only to run into the girl’s friend, arms crossed and head down, staked out in the ice-machine cubby. Sixteen at the most. Hair hanging in her eyes, her developing body squeezed into too-small clothes. Did he think he was virtuous because he had felt a moment of sympathy? Felt pity for the unchosen and discarded, for a lantern made of moth’s wings hung out in the wind? His friends: his actors. What kind of pity made a man invite a child to his hotel room, for treatment he told himself at the time was better than what her friend got?

And Kim. First glimpsed pissing in a doorless stall in a nightclub men’s room, drunk and shrill, found later in a back booth, passed out and her friends gone home. Shirt unbuttoned, a tiny bamboo parasol tucked behind each ear—some drunk’s idea of a joke. Despite that, she always managed to take care of herself. He had called a cab, and she woke up in time to spit and scream curses as he loaded her into the back seat to send her home alone. Semantics: He liked to say to himself that he had never hit her. What about the honeymoon hotel room, how he had grabbed her arms hard, the sound as her head hit the wall? Justified by the fact that she had attacked him first. Pity. Virtue. So chivalrous.

It was not
what
he had done that bothered him half so much as
why
.
Because it was offered
was his answer too often:
offered to
me
! Don’t they know their mistake, that I am not their hero?
Sometimes the
why
had been even worse. One night soon after his divorce from Kim was final, he had found himself crying over Kyra instead. Kyra, the woman with the long black hair from the town where it never rained. He had met her in the Southwest on a shoot, after his crew kept coming back from town with handmade rings, necklaces, belt buckles, all silver and colored stones. “So unusual, isn’t it?” they would say. “So beautiful! I got if from a Native American girl selling jewelry at the plaza.” Like the shallow Hollywood creep he had become, he knew that the reasons he gave at the time for breaking up with her were false. The one and only reason had been that she did not fit with his idea of success. She lived in a pueblo outside of Taos with her family and wrote poetry and dreamed of having her own jewelry store one day. She was everything he had been while growing up in Alaska, everything he wanted to escape—except that she was happy. “Why do I need to prove something to the world?” she used to ask him. “It’s
my
life, for me.”