Forests of the Heart (21 page)

“I know. Everyone puts the time in to keep it that way. Mind you, we do it for ourselves. The landlord couldn’t give a shite.”

“You’d think he’d be happy.”

“I doubt he’s ever set foot in this building,” Miki said. She turned the key, unlocking the door. “Hey, Donal!” she called when the door was open. “Put on your trousers—we’ve company.”

There was no response.

“I guess he’s still out,” Miki said.

Hunter followed her inside to find things no more familiar here than the foyer had been. No surprise, he supposed, considering how brief that earlier visit had been. The front hall was also part of the living room which boasted a pair of club chairs, an old stuffed sofa with a flower print that didn’t quite match the Oriental rug under it, and a handmade shelf running along one wall that held Miki’s stereo and a haphazard collection of vinyl albums, CDs, cassettes, books, and magazines.

From where they stood removing their boots and jackets, Hunter could see the kitchen at the end of the hall, and part of the dining room. The latter had been turned into a bedroom—Miki’s, Hunter realized after a moment, noting a poster of John Coltrane and another advertising Italian-made Castagnari melodeons on the walls. Miki was always raving about their tone and the beautiful wood finishes on the Castagnaris, though she herself played a bright red Paolo Soprani that she’d had for ages, replacing her old Hohner that had wheezed more than offered up musical notes towards the end.

“You gave up your bedroom?” he asked as they walked past the dining room towards the kitchen.

Miki shrugged. “Donal needed the space for his studio. I didn’t want him sleeping in the same room as all those noxious turps and the like. Bad enough he works with them.”

“But it’s your apartment,” Hunter said. “It doesn’t seem right that you don’t even get your own space.”

Miki glanced at him. “There were times when we didn’t have anyplace to live and if it hadn’t been for Donal, I’d have been taken in by social services and put into some foster home. I’d give up a lot more than a bit of personal space for him.”

“You’re right,” Hunter said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know he can be a right little shite, but he is my brother and he really does mean well.”

On the other side of the hall they passed an open door which was obviously Donal’s bedroom. Sparsely furnished, clothes draped everywhere. Miki paused at the closed door a little farther down the hall.

“Donal?” she called, rapping on the wood with a knuckle.

When there was no answer, she opened the door.

“Sometimes when he’s really involved in his work,” she told Hunter, “he doesn’t even hear…”

Her voice trailed off.

“What is it?” Hunter asked.

He stepped around her and then he saw what had stolen away her voice. The room was dominated by a large canvas that had to be at least six foot by nine. Though obviously incomplete, the image caught in the paint was riveting. A naked man wearing a mask of leaves hung Christ-like from an enormous oak. His body was clothed in a nimbus of gold light that was picked up again in the leaves of his mask and the trunk of the tree behind him. Green blood poured from his mouth, the palms of his hands where they were nailed to the tree, and a gaping wound in his abdomen. No, Hunter realized as he stepped closer. Not blood. What poured out of the wounds was a liquid spill of finely detailed leaves and spiraling vines.

The rendering was so perfect that, at a first glance, you thought there really was a man hanging there. No wonder Miki had been so startled.

“Well, it’s an amazing painting,” Hunter said, “but I sure wouldn’t want it hanging on my wall.”

When Miki didn’t respond, he turned to look at her. Her usually cheerful features were pulled into an unfamiliar scowl. Lurking in her eyes was an old sorrow that Hunter had never seen before.

“Oh, Donal,” she said.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

She pointed at the painting. “That’s the dying Summer King.”

A feeling went pinpricking up Hunter’s spine as she spoke. For a moment he found himself thinking of the hard men, of deep woods and the smell of cigarette smoke and wolves, of a sullen anger that ran so deep and wild that he could barely comprehend its surface, never mind empathize with its depth. Then the sensation faded.

He blinked and regarded the canvas again, trying to recapture what he’d just felt, but the immediacy was gone, leaving in its wake only a pale, ragged memory.

“The Summer King?” he asked.

Miki nodded. “Just look at the way he hangs there, a last gleam of goodness and light before the end of things.”

“What do you mean? The end of what things?”

“The summer. The way we are … who we are …”

Hunter regarded her, confused by the depth of her concern.

“But it’s just a painting,” he said.

“For now,” Miki said, her voice so soft he was unsure he’d heard her correctly until she said it again. “For now.”

“Miki, what’s so upsetting about—?”

But she didn’t want to talk about it. Taking his arm, she steered him out of the room, firmly closing the door behind them. She gave him a bright smile.

“So,” she said. “What was that you were saying earlier about dinner at the Dear Mouse Diner?”

Hunter wanted to know what it was about the painting that had so shaken her, but knew he had to let it go for now. Miki could be one of the most stubborn people he knew when she put her mind to it. When she was in headstrong mode, you might as well try arguing with a stone. So he let her change the subject, let her change the mood, and tried to go along with it. But where in the past few days an out-of-place sexual tension had lain uncomfortably between them, now there was something darker. Hunter had no idea what it was. All he knew was that he liked it even less.

Tommy Raven woke from a deep sleep to find his Aunt Sunday sitting patiently on the end of his bed, waiting for him to wake up. He got the sense that she’d been sitting there for hours. Knowing her, she probably had.

Like her sixteen sisters, Sunday Creek was a tall, big-boned woman with a broad, serene face and long crow-black hair, tamed today into a pair of braids that hung halfway to her waist. She was dressed for practicality rather than fashion: jeans, flannel shirt, a beaded deerskin vest. Had it been anyone else, Tommy would have wondered how she’d been able to get into his apartment and sit down here on his bed without waking him, but he’d spent the first fourteen years of his life growing up in a household that contained his mother and her sisters, and nothing they did or said surprised him anymore.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

Her voice held the proper measure of concern, but laughter flickered in her dark eyes.

“I wasn’t really sleeping,” Tommy told her.

“Oh?”

“No, I was composing limericks. This one’s for you: There once was an aunt of the cloth’—that’s you, of course. A play on your name.”

“Very clever.”

“‘Who never was known to cough. Till one day a biscuit, got caught in her brisket, and the hack nearly took her head off.’ “

“Brisket?”

“I needed the rhyme.”

“You’d have been better off sleeping.”

“That bad?”

“Worse. Do you have any tea?”

“Ah.”

Tommy wasn’t exactly a homebody. He lived off his welfare check, not because he was too lazy to hold down a regular nine-to-five, but because a regular job wouldn’t let him do what he considered his real work. Welfare paid for his apartment, the meals he ate in diners and fast-food joints, gas for his pickup, but little else. Happily, the life he’d chosen didn’t require much else. His apartment was utilitarian—though perhaps apartment was a misnomer. There was one small room that served as a combination bedroom and living area, furnished with a sofa bed that had only once been made up into a sofa since he’d moved in, and a wooden fruit crate turned on its side that held a selection of paperback books missing their front covers that he replenished as needed from the trash behind one of the bookstores on Williamson Street. There was a closet of a kitchen which he rarely used. There was an even smaller closet of a bathroom with a claustrophobic shower stall, a toilet, and sink crammed into the remaining space.

But he didn’t need anything else. He’d made a promise to the Creator when Angel got him into detox the last time: Let me live through this and I’ll dedicate my life to Beauty. That everyone had food in their stomach, shelter, knew a few words of kindness—that was his definition of Beauty. He believed in following what David Monogye, the elder of another tribe, had called humankind’s original instructions.

“The original instructions of the Creator are universal and valid for all time,” Monogye wrote in a letter to the United Nations. “The essence of these instructions is compassion for all life and love for all creation. We must realize that we do not live in a world of dead matter, but in a universe of living spirit. Let us open our eyes to the sacredness of Mother Earth, or our eyes will be opened for us.”

When one considered the world in such light, Tommy thought, what need was there for personal property or a hierarchy of worthiness for those with whom he shared the Creator’s gift of life? His only luxury was a pickup truck that his mother had given to him when he last got out of detox, and he only used it to get back and forth from the rez.

“There’s no tea,” he told his aunt. “Not much of anything, really.”

“How about a kettle?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’ve got a pot that holds water—and the left burner on the hot plate works. At least it did the last time I used it.”

“Which was probably a month ago.”

“Two weeks, actually. I had a hot date so I went all out and splurged on some gourmet TV dinners. We dined by moonlight.”

His aunt’s eyebrows rose.

“Okay. I was reheating a take-out soup.”

Sunday reached into the pocket of her shirt and pulled out a pair of tea bags. All his life Tommy’s aunts had had this ability to pull a needed thing from their pocket. Candy, gum, a smudgestick, herbs, charms.

“I’ll go put the water on,” she said. “Do you take your tea black?”

Tommy grinned. “Today I do.”

She shook her head and got up from the bed.

“Get dressed,” she told him. “We need to talk.”

He waited until she’d stepped into the kitchen, then flung back his blanket. His clothes hung from the arm of the sofa bed. It only took him a few moments to put on jeans, T-shirt, a checked flannel shirt. Straightening the blankets on his bed, he went to stand in the doorway where he watched his aunt rinse out a couple of mugs. They hadn’t been dirty, simply dusty from disuse.

“Aunt Sunday,” he said after a moment. “Why are you here?”

“We’re worried about you.”

He didn’t have to ask who she meant. “We” would encompass Sunday herself, his mother, and their fifteen other sisters, his aunts. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to have grown up in that household when they were young, all those gangly girls with their broad, happy faces; a pack of rambunctious and fey tomboys, by all accounts, running wild through the rez, touched by Mystery and Beauty. But they’d been grown women by the time he was born—the unhappy reminder of his mother’s bad marriage, though no one ever said it in so many words.

“I chose this life,” he told her. “I know I’ve never amounted to much, but what I’m doing now is a lot better than lying drunk in some alley.”

Sunday turned from the sink to look at him. The humor that usually sparkled in her eyes had been replaced with an unfamiliar sadness.

“We’ve always been proud of you, Tommy,” she said.

“Yeah, right.”

He’d left home when he was fifteen, full of an anger he couldn’t explain, torn between the traditionalists—best exemplified by his aunts, or by the Warrior’s Society—and those who’d simply given up, the kids sniffing glue and gasoline in back of the community center when they couldn’t score some booze or drugs, killing themselves slowly instead of the way the more desperate did: putting the barrel of a hunting rifle in their mouth, or taking a drop from the garage rafters with a rope around their necks. He’d just needed to get away. Away from the losers. Away from that house of women. Away from the sweat-lodge boys and the Indian Power champions.

So what did he do? He tracked down his father in the city and went to live with him. The first couple of weeks were great. Frank Raven welcomed his son into the seedy apartment he had in Lower Foxville, proudly introducing him to everyone as the long-lost son “the bitch” had stolen from him. But blood was true and a father’s love always won out in the end, because here was his boy again, making a man’s choice, the right choice, living with his father, where he belonged. There was a party every other night and no one said he was too young to join in. It was, “Welcome to civilization,” and “Here, Tommy, have a brew,” and “Fuck the elders; we’ll make our own good times.”

Then one night, without provocation, Frank beat the crap out of him in the middle of one of those parties and threw Tommy out on the street to fend for himself.

“You ever come back here again,” Frank told his son, “and you’re dead meat. Got it?”

Tommy lived on the streets then, too proud to go back to the rez with his tail between his legs, too scared to approach his father again. Frank’s friends, when they saw Tommy, took to calling him Dead Meat after his father’s parting words.

Life hadn’t been easy after that. He turned to sleeping on the streets, panhandling, or turning tricks down at the Y. Some of the guys hanging in the changing rooms got real turned on by an Indian kid. They’d call him Chief, or Squaw Boy, slip him an extra few bucks if he’d use B-movie Indian dialogue. A year later he was in juvie hall where Angel bailed him out.

Angel. Her real name was Angelina Marceau and she looked like an angel—long dark hair falling in a waterfall of natural ringlets, heart-shaped face, the warmest eyes you could imagine. All she was missing were the wings. They called her the Grasso Street Angel, not because of her looks, but because of the way she helped people, especially kids and the homeless, out of a street-front office on Grasso Street.