Tours of the Black Clock (6 page)

“What’s going on?” I say.

“How old are you Banning?” he says. He knows how old I am, or at least he has a general idea. I sit listening a moment, the rest of the house is quiet. Henry’s being very friendly. His voice is big brotherly.

“What’s going on,” I say again.

“A lady, Banning,” Henry answers, “a lady for Banning tonight.” He pulls the blanket off the bed and throws me my pants off the dresser. “Come on.”

I’m suspicious of his big brotherliness, and I’m also seduced by it. I’ve wanted it for a long time, longer than I’ve wanted to know a woman, though I’ve been wanting that pretty strongly for the last year or two. “Where are we going?” I say to him.

“We’re going to see a lady friend, don’t you want to see a lady friend? See if that machine fits in something besides your hand. You’re going to be popular, little brother.”

“But who is it?”

“Are you going to get dressed?” Slowly I start pulling on my pants, there in the dark of the bedroom, nine white patches swimming around me. “She’s a friend of Oral’s and mine. Father’s, too. Sort of the Jainlight men’s all-around friend.”

“But why? Why’s she a friend?”

Henry pauses and says, “We pay her to be a friend. I’ve got the money right here in my pocket. You’ll see.” I don’t doubt he stole it from Alice like he always does. “Here’s your shirt,” he says, pulling one out of the drawer, and then he leaves the room. I grab my shoes and follow him, not entirely sure about any of it, but unwilling to let escape the prospect of manhood and brotherhood all in the same night. He’s at the bottom of the stairs when I’m at the top. He looks up and puts his finger to his lips. A dim light comes from the living room. Holding my shoes I move down the stairs barefooted. In a chair in the living room Alice sleeps with a comforter pulled up around her chin. The tight little curls around her head begin to droop across her brow. Henry approaches her, standing over her, then looks over his shoulder at me and gestures to the back of the house. I move through the kitchen as quickly as possible. I bang into the table and knock a pan from the stove, catching it in midair.

Oral’s waiting outside the back door. His hands are shoved deep in his pockets, but actually it’s a warm night. Henry comes out the back door behind me and nods at Oral, and Oral without saying a word signals us to follow him. We head off with the valley before us bleached blue from the full moon, and the fences of the ranch jag across our view like white stitches on a wound. We make our way past the barn and the stables and I can hear the horses rustle and speak to the sound of our feet. None of us says anything until I say, once we’re past the stables, “Where are we going?” and then we’re quiet again since neither of them answers me. Finally I say something like, “She does it for money?” and then Oral says, “Will you keep quiet?” and Henry says, “That’s it, Banning, she does it for money. Like I said.” Then we go on some more until we’re to the outskirts of the ranch.

This is where the Indians live. There’s not much left of them at this point, one family that’s made up of a mother and father and two small kids and a grandfather, living in a single hut; and in another hut an old woman whose man used to work on the ranch before he died; and in the third hut Gayla, the halfbreed kitchen help. It’s Gayla’s hut we go to, in the dark. We’re all looking around over our shoulders, though I’m not certain what it is we’re looking for. The moon splashes on the trees like milk. I don’t know what to make of it that Oral takes a screwdriver from his pocket and snaps off the lock on Gayla’s door. It takes about as much force as opening a bottle. The two of them burst into the hut and I hear some muffled sound from inside. “Will you get in here,” I hear Henry saying to me, and I go in.

There’s not much to see in the hut. The moon lights it up clearly and I can see the Indian woman on a bed in the corner. She’s holding her arm across her eyes, maybe from the light, but maybe from something else she doesn’t want to see, I don’t know. “Close the door,” Oral says, and then he says it again. I close it a little ways, but leave it open enough so I can see her. Oral’s got her by the arms and Henry’s saying to me, “All right, soldier, all right,” and he keeps gesturing for me to come closer. I stand where I am. “You can tear her clothes off if you want,” I hear Henry say. Gayla cries out. The other Indians in the other huts must hear all this, but no one’s running over to see what’s going on. It’s easy to picture them huddling in their beds waiting for the whole thing to be done. When I don’t move from where I stand, Henry tears her clothes off.

“I thought she does it for money,” I say.

“It is for money,” Henry insists, “it’s just part of the game, doing it this way. It’s just a kind of play, you know. Like one of those things you write all the time. Come on now. Get that monster of yours ready. We’ll warm things up for you.”

“Me first,” I hear Oral command. Henry hesitates a moment and then obeys, taking Gayla by the arms while Oral takes her first. Oral’s finished in about twenty seconds. He groans and rocks back on his feet, and then nods to Henry and holds her by the arms while Henry takes his turn. Henry takes a little longer. Gayla’s stopped crying and in the shadow of Henry’s body I don’t see her face right now, and I’m thinking maybe it’s a game at that. Henry finishes and collapses back for a moment, then gasps, “All right, little brother, all yours.” But I can’t quite move from where I’m standing, and after a moment Oral says to me, “Come on, I’m not going to hold her all night.” Henry says, “We went to a lot of trouble on this for you, little brother. Don’t let us down here.” Slowly I take down my pants and approach the woman. I’m not quite ready. My body reflects the confusion of my head, neither up nor down. But I come up to her, exposed to her, and when I do her silence shatters, and she screams.

She screams. I think at first she’s screaming at the size of me, and I feel humiliated and furious. For a moment part of me wants to hit her. And just as I’m thinking this, Henry says to me, “You can hit her if you want. She expects it,” and that makes me stop. Because I know everything’s wrong. When she screams she isn’t looking at the middle of me, she’s looking in my eyes. It’s my face she’s crying out at. And the scream isn’t a physical one, it’s from somewhere else in her, and the tears are running down her cheeks, and her fear is
tender
.

And that’s when I know.

Don’t ask me how I know. I don’t know how. There’s nothing in her face that would give me any idea, maybe a certain wideness around the eyes. Maybe a flatness of the nose. There’s nothing about her that looks anything like me, as far as I can see, though if I could see further maybe there’d be something in the mouth. Maybe our hands would share the same lines, maybe our shoulders would slope the same way. Maybe her footsteps would fit exactly into mine, if mine were left in the winter snow. But she could fit so completely into me that I could never expect to know how I once fit so completely into her. Anyway, I know. I know at this moment.

And … things are jumbled now. They’re slow and they’re fast, and it’s hard to tell what’s happening between all of us in this dark hut, where what’s happening in our heads and what’s happening in our hands is the same. I’m not sure when Oral and Henry know that I know, exactly.

Big is the violence in me.

It has a sound, the slosh of Henry’s brains when I take his head in my hands. I suppose in this last moment before his ears run with the pulp of membrane and blood he understands that I know. The scream from him, well, it’s not much of a scream, really. A bit of a yelp. It cuts off mid-pain. If I were a bit more selfpossessed in this moment I’d prolong it a bit, to make sure he knows that I know. To make sure there’s not a
misunderstanding
. I drop him from my hands and he crumples to the floor. Oral looks at the heap of Henry there in the moonlight and the expression in his eyes is very satisfying to me. He looks from Henry to me, his eyes wide as dollars, and he bolts for the door. I catch him long before he gets there. He’s screaming so as to be heard clear across the valley, but the sound of it just can’t travel fast enough to make any difference.

I’m a little more selfpossessed now. I take one of his hands in mine and it only takes a squeeze or two to shatter every bone in it. I’m a little more selfpossessed. “Don’t mind me, Oral,” I say, “I’m just a big stupid boy who’s a sucker for a good joke. That’s all this is, isn’t it, just a good joke. A good joke for the big stupid boy.” Oral’s sputtering unintelligibly at what I’ve done to his hand. “I could do it to your neck too,” I say to him, “and unless you think you might like that, you have to tell the big stupid boy all about it.” I shake him by the neck long enough that he can begin to hear in his head the shiver of his spinal cord.

He tells me. He tells the big stupid boy all about it, and it’s quite a good joke at that. Everyone was in on it except the big boy. Oral, of course, isn’t making complete sense, Oral isn’t telling the joke in an absolutely clear way. He mixes up the sequence a bit. But even a big stupid boy can figure it out, even I can put it together. The way I put it together, my father fathered two of us, so to speak. Maybe even the same night, for all I can tell from Oral’s gibberish. Maybe the same night seventeen years ago he conceived a child with Alice, the way I put it together. At any rate he left the bed of his wife not having had nearly enough of a woman, and lit out for the Indian huts where he left his seed in Gayla as well; both women became pregnant. Both women carried their child in them within a mile of each other. For a while my father must have thought the joke was on him. Over and over he tried to send the Indian away, over and over she returned to the huts. Alice regarded Gayla’s pregnancy as a sort of dreadful coincidence, maybe she thought the joke was on her. She held steadfast against acknowledging the truth of the matter even as anyone else could and did. Oral’s struggling now to explain it, he’s squirming in the balance of my wrath and curiosity. The way I put it together, both women gave birth within a mile and six hours of each other, with an orderly and almost precise clockwork that might have been the orderly and precise Nineteenth Century having one last good joke on the Twentieth. Alice’s labor was tortured, her child dead. “Come on now Oral,” I’m saying, “come on. I just
know
this is where it gets good.” Oral spits and slobbers. Alice lies unconscious struggling for life. My father hits on the masterstroke by which he solves the problem of his bastard quarter-Indian child who’s been born on this very same day and doing it in a fashion practically befitting a white man. And it’s damn shrewd of my father at that. For such an unstable man, I mean. For such an unstable man he somehow figured that the Indian woman who kept coming back every time he sent her away would let him take the child and never say a word. He somehow figured that if the wife he cheated lived long enough she would accept the child in awful silent suspicion never voicing the slightest question that wanted no answer. I don’t know how he figured it, to be honest. So my father rides to the Indian huts and takes Gayla’s son, and returns with the baby to the ranch and places it in the crib where another child has died only hours before. “Who would have figured it, Oral?” I say to him there in the dark of the hut with the sound of my mother sobbing at my side. “But you’re absolutely right, it’s a fine joke.” He crumples to the floor like Henry did, though life still moans from him.

The Indian woman has stopped sobbing but still holds her face in her hands. Part of me still wants to hit her, I want to make her tell me why she let him take me from her. The idea I hate most is that she might have actually thought it was better for me, to live in a white and blue, sound and certain house, in a room with nine windows. She might have thought it. I take the blanket from the bed and put it around her. “I’ll be back,” I tell her.

T.O.T.B.C.—4

I
TELL IT TO
her but maybe she doesn’t hear me. I’m already halfway out the door, crossing the outskirts of the ranch with the moon white and huge above the blue hills. I’m driving the bigness of me across the stables toward the house in big strides, I’m not thinking at all. I’m not calculating anything, I’m just doing. They’re sleeping in the house, they don’t have any idea what’s coming for them.

A big surprise, that’s what.

I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn’t an act of fury, fury isn’t part of it anymore. It’s more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation. I come into the kitchen and Minnie comes running in from the room off to the side where she sleeps. Even in the dark she takes one look at me and knows. The terror comes from her like a blast from a furnace. Even in the dim light of the moon I can see the whiteness of terror’s blast.

“It’s Minnie,” I laugh, “it’s Minnie from Old Virginie.”

She dashes back into the house. I let her go, I can’t be bothered with her. She’s starting to yell through the silence of the house but it doesn’t matter. It’s only fair actually, it gives them a chance.

Alice is no longer in the living room chair wrapped in a comforter. By now she’s retired upstairs. That’s where I’m headed. At the top is my father, stumbling out of his bedroom. He’s in the hall when I get to the top of the stairs. His tyranny doesn’t allow him really to understand what’s happening at this moment. He thinks it’s something he can take care of with a rifle, or with a beating in the barn with the horses. “What the hell is this, in the middle of the night?” he says to me.

“Hello father,” I say to him. I’m all the way up to him before he has the sense to step backward. I catch him as he momentarily loses his footing. It takes only part of my strength to lift him from his place and throw him against the wall. It’s a fucking nuisance that he doesn’t wise up, I have to keep throwing him against walls. It’s just absolutely necessary that he understands this, I can’t feel good about it otherwise. Making him angry is useless to me and I have to keep throwing him against walls until the anger goes away. When the anger goes away he’ll finally start to fear for something and when he finally starts to fear for something then he’ll finally start to fear for everything, and then I can feel good about it. Alice is screaming in the bedroom doorway.