In This Light (21 page)

Nothing like that was going to happen to you and me, Ray. When I got the call from your sister Marilee, she didn’t whisper,
No breath, no heartbeat.

Danny Kite, my partner, my driver, tried to sit up, but his belly bulged with poison gas, something stuck deep in the bowel—roasted squirrel or kidney pie, blue cornbread and fried okra—something he ate two nights before, harmless once, and now gone rancid.

The woman on the phone, Marilee Dancy, older sister of Caleb and Raymond Good Bird, mother of Roshelle and grandmother of baby Jeanne, cousin of Thomas Kimmel, and granddaughter of Safiya Whirling Thunder, said,
Six of us here, seven, counting Raymond.

I told Danny plenty of people to help me lift the man, carry him to the bed, the river, the white station wagon we called our ambulance.

Whatever seemed right.

Whatever proved necessary.

I don’t know why I didn’t feel you, Ray, sticky as the sticky heat, already here, already gone, already breathing down my lungs, already deep inside me. I told Danny:
Sit, lie down, stay
, and like the sick little dog he was, Danny Kite obeyed me.

We’re not real EMTs, not even Woofers, WFRs, Wilderness First Responders, but we did get a crash course, five hours one day in Missoula, three pink-skinned dummies to rescue and resuscitate, 1982, nine summers ago, the year we started fighting fires.

We go every year we can—Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming.
Summer vacation
, Danny says. Stomping flames and plowing firebreaks is good work for a hungry Indian. We don’t throw firecrackers in the grass. We don’t torch timber. We’re hungry, yes, but not that crazy. We’ve seen our own forests blaze—Mount Sentinel, Lost Canyon. We’re Chippewa-Cree, some cloudy mix with French and Oglala. We’ve been wandering half our lives, dazed and unemployed for a century. When the smoke signals rise, when the fire is somewhere else, we give thanks for strange mercies.

Back home on Rocky Boy, we run the ambulance, our magically rebuilt Falcon Futura. We answer anybody’s call, any day, any hour. We come when the dispatcher in Havre won’t answer, when there’s no money and no insurance to ferry the half-dead in a real ambulance with trained medical technicians and a pulsing siren.

Maybe Nadine Hard Heart slips us two dollars for gas. Maybe her husband Kip who almost choked on a bone asks us to sit down, share their dinner: two little ducks, canned peas, a heap of instant mashed potatoes. Mostly we don’t get paid, and it doesn’t matter. Five terrified, not-so-hard-hearted children breathe their silent praise, and we feel lucky. Seven months later, one of those skinny kids appears at the door with three pounds of elk steak to sustain us on our journeys. Luisa Hard Heart’s offering means her father survived, lived to hunt again, met the elk face-to-face high on a ridge in the Bear Paw Mountains. Now there’s food to spare: this flesh, his flesh, our flesh, a miracle.

Danny and I don’t keep track. It isn’t necessary. We do this for us, all of us, our people, because we learned one day with pale dummies how to breathe into another man’s body, how to slow the blood from a severed artery, how to pump a child’s heart with our hands, how to count and not stop and keep our faith, the old one. We don’t have a choice: things you know but don’t use eat you inside out, starved weasels biting hard, furious in your belly.

Saving you is saving me. It’s not a good deed: it’s my own body.

Looking at Danny rolling on the cot, I thought I’d have to resuscitate him before helping you.
Stay
, I said.
Trust me
, I said, like a fool.

We were boys together, Danny Kite and me, one mother and one father between us. We’d rescued each other plenty of times. I rolled him home in a wheelbarrow the day he flew off Wendy Wissler’s roof and broke his ankle. Six-year-old Danny pulled my head out of a pail the morning I passed out proving how long I could stay underwater. In a summer storm, we scrambled into the highest branches of a ponderosa pine to let the wind thrash us side to side; to spin, to heave, to be the storm, to think like wind and rain, to be that wild. Danny’s father Earl had to climb the tree twice to save us.

One January night, my father drank six shots of tequila and walked out into the snow barefoot and naked. He wanted to prove that the real world is beyond this one, that everything here is only a shadow, that fire could not scar and ice would not burn him. We found the man two days later, the blue shadow of him, and it was true: nothing before or after seemed real.

Danny’s mother lived in Billings, in prison, sixteen years for forging a hundred-dollar check. Joella Kite wanted bourbon and cigarettes, a pink blouse embroidered with white daisies. She brought us banana cream pie and frozen Cool Whip, Orange Crush and spicy tortilla chips. I remember thinking nobody on Rocky Boy had ever been this happy.

Then Joella was gone, but between our houses, we had a whole family, and so it was: Danny Kite and I loved each other as brothers.

Trust me
, I said when your sister Marilee called. Trust was all we had. Trust and luck and some kind of weird, hopeful vision.

My mother Pauline died of a toothache.
Abscess
, the doctor told us.
If she’d come to town in time, we could have taken the tooth, drained the hole, given her antibiotics.
I suppose He meant to comfort us with knowledge. In Pauline’s little house on Rocky Boy, bacteria spilled into her blood and brain. My mother’s feet and hands and ears turned black before Hector Slow Child found her. She said,
I don’t think we’ll make it. Please
, she said,
just lie down here beside me.

Danny’s father died of old age at forty-seven. Earl Kite drowned in his own bed, wheezing with emphysema, rattled by double pneumonia.
It’s a good day
, he said.
I’m tired.
Joella Kite got out but went back and got out again and drove into a semi.

Now we were orphans.

Raymond, I see your face, a dark brown Chippewa face, pocked and pitted deep, like lava that bubbled up from the center of the earth to cool rough and ravaged on the surface. Raymond Good Bird, scarred by acne or disease, scorched like the earth itself, a face that revealed the suffering of a thousand homeless Indians or the aftermath of some spooky chemical explosion—like the trees of Vietnam, you’d erupted.

Yours was a face to love: without love, there was no way to look at you.

Marilee’s kitchen steamed. Your sister had been simmering beans all day, frying bread and onions. She’d boiled up two sad, sorry reservation chickens to shred the meat and make fajitas, a family feast to welcome you home, Raymond Good Bird, their soldier returned from the jungle war, then lost again, twenty-two years, working tugboats, hauling garbage, killing rats and roaches, grinding fat and flesh to stuff sausages, hosing hogs, plucking cherries, lying down drunk in the street and waking up half-frozen in jail—losing three toes, losing two fingers—Raymond found, Raymond recovered, Raymond come home at last only to lie down and die in the heat of your sister’s kitchen.

You were skinny as a skinny chicken yourself, blistered from childhood and all the diseases of all our ancestors, wounded three times in the war, three times before, four times after it: firecracker, hand grenade, white boy’s BB gun, brother’s arrow—fishing knife, M-16, electric drill, broken bottle—shrapnel in the thigh, straightedge razor across the belly.

Raymond Good Bird, cut up inside every hour of every day from the war you’d fought and the wars that killed you, sliced for forty-four years and sewn back together with invisible thread, invisible sinew of the last white buffalo.

You had no alcohol in your blood today, nothing to preserve you, only the homemade root beer you’d been drinking with your big sister Marilee and your blind, toothless grandmother Safiya. Your brother Caleb and cousin Thomas snuck nips out back and pretended nobody noticed, but you stayed straight to be with Marilee and your niece Roshelle. You stayed sober to hold Roshelle’s baby Jeanne, eight months old and already speaking some secret language.

I see you eating chilies from a jar, ten green jalapeños and seven fiery orange habaneros. The buzz was quick, but the burn lingered. Thomas and Caleb swallowed their peppers whole, a wild Raymond-Good-Bird-welcome-home contest.

You cradled wide-eyed, wonderful baby Jeanne against your wounded chest, and Roshelle, too beautiful for whiteman’s words, Marilee’s I’ve-come-to-break-your-heart daughter, gazed at you as if you were the child’s long-lost belovéd father.

Roshelle was just a baby herself the last time you saw her, round baby Roshelle two years old when you dressed up as a soldier boy and said good-bye forever. She kissed you on the mouth this morning and swore she remembered. She kissed you on each pitted cheek.
Uncle Ray.
She held you tight—scrawny, pocked you—and you felt whole and young, pressed up that way against her just-turned-into-a-woman, just-became-a-mother body.

Lovely she was, your niece, long and lovely, smooth, as tall as you and much stronger, like Marilee before she swelled, soft and warm to touch like your mother Minnie before cancer curved her spine and turned her skin yellow.

In the light of Roshelle Dancy, in her body reflecting morning light,
this
morning’s light before the heat grew terrible, in the sweet golden light spilling through worn-thin-as-gauze curtains, in the radiant love of Roshelle, your whole family came alive, the long-dead and unborn. All your wandering people filled the house and yard, and their voices surged, a song inside you.

That was morning, Ray, and now it was afternoon, getting on toward evening, and you rocked baby Jeanne to sleep, and you handed her back to her mother, and the silly boys came inside, not drunk, not quite, not really, and you swallowed jalapeños and habaneros, and the peppers made your head hum, and you said,
I need to sit down
, but you didn’t make it.

You collapsed on the kitchen floor, and you stayed there till I found you. Now, in the thick glaze of afternoon, everything looked filthy. Bubbling beans and sizzling onions splattered; the smell of boiled chicken filled the house; orange cheese melted.

And it was hot, so hot, and I stood in the doorway, and I couldn’t move: I didn’t even try to help you. I’ve knelt over three dummies and twenty-seven real live human beings and thumped their chests to get their lungs heaving, but I saw you on the floor, and I saw something yellow above you in the terrible heat, a cloud of smoky yellow dust like the puff off a mushroom; I smelled something underneath the smell of boiled-to-smithereens chicken. Something a hundred times hotter than red chili dust seared my nostrils; and a voice that sounded like God’s if God had died with the Ghost Dancers, if God had been shoveled into a pit in the snow and buried, if God had lain dry in the dry earth for more than a century,
that
crackling voice said,
Too late, little brother.

It could have been you, Ray, or the pinto pony at the window over the sink, or the little black dog with one white ear and one white paw that wouldn’t stop yapping.

I think now it was the wind, the hot wind, the useless fan beating hot air into the hot kitchen. This voice from the whirlwind said,
Who are you?
And the voice inside my chest said,
You can’t.
And the dry silence from your body said,
Don’t bother.

Maybe it’s all an excuse, something I imagined after. I was scared, it’s true. I don’t know why you scared me.

I can still feel Roshelle’s fist hammering my back, can still hear Marilee whisper,
Do something.
The frenzied dog ripped the cloth of my pants and sank her sharp teeth into my ankle, and the little spotted horse put her whole head through the open window by the sink, and I looked at the faces of all your people—Caleb, Marilee, Roshelle, Thomas, Jeanne, Safiya—and I thought if they loved you so much, why couldn’t they save you?

Once upon a time you tried to come home, but you couldn’t live in peace among us. Every dark-eyed boy was one you’d killed, every child a gook, every woman your enemy. A thin teenage mother at the grocery store in Havre propped her plump baby on one hip and stared at you with unmitigated rage or benevolent wonder, her look as impenetrable as the gaze of the wounded Vietnamese mother bleeding out, five holes: chest, thigh, belly. She held her child in one arm on one hip—yes, like this—and with miraculous grace, the tiny Vietnamese woman slit her son’s throat, clean and deep through the vein: so he wouldn’t starve when she died, so he couldn’t be spared, so you would not shoot him.

Your platoon lost thirteen men in nine days to booby traps and sniper fire. You burned the first village you found, unnamed on your lieutenant’s map, just a cluster of huts at a slow bend of the Cua viet River. You shot the people as they ran. You killed their pigs and dogs and chickens. Later, you found three women and two boys bleeding into the water. You knew these people, five slender Cheyenne cut breast to bowel and trampled at the banks of Washita, slaughtered to the joyful noise of bugles and gunfire. The ones whose thick blood swirled into the muddy Cua viet were Pocatello’s stunned Shoshone, five of the four hundred forty-three slain at Bear River. These five were Nez Percé in flight, awakened to die, skulls crushed by the boot heels and gun butts of drunken soldiers at the Big Hole.

If you opened their bodies, would you find your last word, a curse spat out and long forgotten? What did it matter? You fired. Their blood spilled. You witnessed. You’d murdered them all: brothers, sisters, ancestors, grandchildren.

You didn’t want forgiveness. You wanted the wounded Vietnamese mother to take you in her arms as her own child—to comfort, and to kill you.

For twenty-two years you lived without faith, without love or the hope of it.
Bozeman, Coeur d’Alene, Walla Walla, Wenatchee.
You thought if you moved fast enough the dead might lose your scent and stop following.

You dangled sixty feet in the air, washing windows, downtown Boise. You met yourself face-to-face, the blue-skinned man hanging in dark glass, flesh pocked by soap and water. You hauled thirty-seven dead sheep down a hillside west of Helena. They’d died as one, skulls fractured by lightning, the head of each sheep resting tenderly on the rump of another. They were filthy now, their gray wool rain-soaked, their shocked bodies bloated. Flies swarmed you and them. Crows and hawks and kestrels circled. You lifted them by their broken legs, you and two Colombian men who called themselves Jesús and Eduardo, who jabbered as they worked, quick Spanish words muffled by bandannas. You tore your own rag from your mouth and nose to be with the dead, to know their smell, to breathe their bodies. The Colombian brothers laughed when they heard you choking.
Estúpido.
Even then you didn’t hide your face. You heaved the pitiful animals into the bed of the rancher’s truck. You saw that each face was distinct, with a certain space between the eyes, a soft curve of the mouth, a singular tilt of nose and forehead. Each one of them—and you, and Jesús, and Eduardo—secretly made, silently belovéd. Why were you whole? Why were they shattered?