Red Ant House Page 14

  “What’s lost?” Irene shook herself, rubbed her eyes, saw her mother crawling around on the floor.

  The hypnotist lifted his foot. Josephine looked at his shoe, then at the floor under his shoe, then, in horror, at the shoe as it crashed down on the floor. She jerked up. Her hands flew to her stomach. She gasped and the hypnotist laughed. “The automatic reflex of an amputee,” he said. “Mama’s going to dream tonight,” he said. Josephine’s lips were trembling. Her eye had begun to twitch, her shoulders to heave.

  “Well, honey,” the man said, “why’d you give it to me if you were only going to take it back?” He grinned. “All sales are final!”

  He picked his foot up, studied the bottom of his shoe, seemed to scrape something off the bottom, winked at Josephine. He popped the thing in his mouth. Josephine’s mouth dropped open and her eyes bulged.

  “What’s lost!” Irene demanded.

  The hypnotist shrugged. “Everything,” he said. His right cheek poufed like a chipmunk’s. “I have eaten the plum she gave me. It was cold,” he said. “So delicious.” He opened his mouth, fluttered his purple tongue. And then he swallowed. He sat back and licked his lips. “Another satisfied customer.”

  Irene scowled. “Nothing’s lost, Mom.”

  Josephine was clutching her stomach as if she had been run through with a sword, and the hypnotist was grinning. When had he felt so good? He leaned forward, shielded his mouth with his hand, and whispered a little secret to Josephine. “She’s right, you know. It’s not lost. Looky here. It’s in the cuff of my pant.”

  Josephine sagged against the couch. She stared miserably at the little disk he fished from the cuff.

  “Let’s go, Mom,” Irene said.

  “Go?” Josephine said. “We can’t go.”

  “She can’t go,” the hypnotist agreed. “I got her gumption.”

  But Irene was tired of this. Why had she come? She didn’t want to come. Josephine had begged her to come. Be my courage, Josephine had said. She was always having to be Mama’s courage. That’s what daughters are for, Josephine liked to say.

  Irene stood. “I’m going,” she said.

  “Going?” Josephine said.

  Irene, hands fisted, stood over her mother. She teetered in that is-it-almost-over-I-can’t-stand-any-more-of-this posture that she knew her mother hated. Josephine, looking up, saw Irene poised for flight. Poised in that if-you-don’t-pay-attention-to-me-right-now-you’ll-regret-it stance. Josephine frowned.

  Suddenly, Josephine wanted a drink. She couldn’t deal with the girl anymore.

  She wanted a smoke. She began digging around in her purse but then remembered why she was here. Wasn’t he supposed to do something about this? She frowned at the man. He leered at her. Her stomach flipped.

  It was getting late, though, and she wanted a smoke. She stood up. Her legs wobbled. Her head spun. She clutched her purse with both hands and walked carefully to the door. She felt as if her parts didn’t quite connect.

  “Go?” the hypnotist boomed.

  Josephine looked back at him. The man’s eyes smoldered, and she shuddered.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said.

  Josephine moistened her lips. But Irene had her hand on the knob, and when the door opened, Josephine saw the man’s eyes grow wide. How sweet, she thought. He doesn’t want me to leave.

  The air in the room was rotten with perfume. The hypnotist stared at the door. White-knuckled, he gripped his chair. His lips twitched spastically into something that wanted to be, and then was, a smile. “Go?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Need not be present to win!” he shouted.

  He looked from the door to the little hairs on his knuckles, turned his left hand over. With eyes half closed, he gazed at the center of his palm. The skin was yellowish, thick, though as he watched it began to change, to bubble, tumorlike. Gradually, the skin tightened and stretched and seemed to crack. A glowing disk, flat as a penny, worried its way to the surface.

  The hypnotist held it up to his eye. There was a pinpoint hole at the center, and he stared through it at the door and laughed again. He tossed the disk into the air, caught it. “Heads or tails?” He slapped it hard onto the back of his hand. “Tails. You lose.” He ground the thing into his hand, then watched it emerge on the other side.

  Was that the whisper of wheels on pavement? “Back again?” He cocked his head and smiled at the door. But he heard no humming engine. The little disk quivered.

  The six o’clock sun filtered through the blinds, scissoring the couch where the woman had sat. The trailer was quiet. He listened for the birds, but the birds never sang in the six o’clock heat. He frowned at the door. “Well, aren’t you the little flirt,” he said.

  He got up, walked to the door, opened it, looked out into the cellophane waves that shimmied above the asphalt. Hot, stinky tar bubbled up through cracks at the base of his stoop. There was no one on the lot but him. There was no one in the drive.

  “Gone?” he said. He shrugged. “Oh, well.”

  Really, he blamed himself. He was always going too far. A little rambunctious, that’s what he was. Always had been. He chuckled at himself, at the way he was. And he was so sure he’d get lucky today—if not with the girl, then the mom. “Just shows you never can tell,” he said.

  In the palm of his hand, he held the disk over the asphalt. “If you don’t want it,” he shouted in the direction of the road, “I don’t, either.” With the index finger of his left hand, he flicked the disk.

  It jiggled.

  He flicked it again.

  It jiggled.

  He pushed it hard with the ball of his thumb, then shook his hand vigorously.

  The little peach, grown sticky in the heat, clung to him.

  He stepped back into the room, closed the door. His hands were gooey with it. “Down the drain you go,” he said, heading toward the bathroom, but stopped. It seemed, somehow, larger. Had it grown? Could it have? Irritated, the thing sat, swollen and flaming, in the ball of his hand, and it smelled! Did it stink? He put it to his nose and sniffed. An odor, surely blood, the suffocating stink of blood-laced perfume, spoiled the air, and his hand itched. He scratched. The thing throbbed. It was a throbbing itch, and his fingers, he saw with horror, were swelling. He tried to make a fist but the fingers, each of them, were red and pregnant and didn’t want to close. And perhaps . . . His eyes weren’t so good anymore.

  Yes, tiny blue veins laced the crusted edges of the thing in his hand. He began to tremble. When he looked closely he saw that the veins extended beyond the thing and into . . . Into?

  Like a small boy, he put his hand behind his back. The birds were singing again. The thing was pulsing. Into him? His ears were ringing.

  “Now you see it,” he murmured. “Now you don’t.” He gasped.

  It was gone. He felt it leave! He pulled his hand from behind his back. His palm was flat and yellow. He laughed, and then he hiccupped because there it was again, a slimy, pulsing, growing gob.

  “Nowyouseeit, nowyoudon’t!”

  It jiggled, little belly laugh. The birds twittered.

  This was wrong. He held it upside down, shook his hand, shook it vigorously, but the more he shook, the bigger it got. He stopped shaking. Sweat beads rolled along his fat lines. She—

  Shouldn’t have given it. What was she thinking? To give such a thing!

  Then why’d you take it, dummy, he couldn’t help but think, if you were only going to give it back? All sales final!

  He slumped into his chair. He felt like crying, and he felt like laughing. Well, this was something new, at least. He stared at the wad in the palm of his hand. “Are you my little wife?” he said. He ran his finger over the thing, which was now, clearly, a translucent, pulsing membrane. He shuddered. “Are you my love?”

  Bitterwater

  I’m not the sort of person who takes satisfaction in being scared to death. Some like it. They’ll go to horror films for pleasure. I can’t u
nderstand that. I’ve walked out of nearly every horror film I’ve gone to. My dad says life is scary enough; he tells war stories about being an Air Force navigator in World War II, how nothing you can imagine actually feels like being up in the air—no boundaries but air, and the bullets coming at you are real. But after I lived a bit with Manny, I thought he could imagine it, and better. Maybe he had something wrong with him. He was always on edge, like his whole person was this fighter plane with air boundaries and the bullets coming at him were real.

  When I married Manny, it broke my dad’s heart. Manny got in my head the day I met him. I was thirteen. My family had just moved to the Navajo reservation. A bunch of us played softball next to the Kerr Magee housing compound. Manny wasn’t a company kid, but he came over anyway with his friends. Manny pitched. When I came up to bat, he stood on the mound and started tossing the ball in the air. He was chewing his gum, tossing the ball, chewing his gum, and then he started singing: “Walking down a country road in Tennessee, I met a little girl . . .” He got me laughing. He put his hands and the ball behind his back, closed his eyes like he was in choir, and sang that entire country song. I was rolling on the ground when he finally threw the ball. “That’s strike two hundred and three,” he said. He kept count of all the strikes he never got on me.

  “You cheat,” I told him.

  Manny walked right up to me in the batter’s square. He said, “I’m hurt. You have hurt me very bad.” He told me that when I hurt him, I hurt his ancestors. Manny was Todacheene clan, which means Bitterwater. He was named for his clansman, Manuelito, the last great Navajo chief, who watched over him, just like God, so now a great chiefs feelings were probably hurt. “The only thing to do,” he said, “is get some money from your dad so we can go get a hamburger.”

  My dad wouldn’t give me more than enough for one hamburger, though. He said, “That boy’s got money. The government gives them money.”

  Manny said, “That’s all right, Brenda. Buy one, and you can watch me eat.”

  Watching Manny eat was a thing. This was a wide, pancake-size hamburger from the Dog House, a skinny sliver of gray meat with two tiny dots of pickle and a squirt of mustard packed between two fat buns. I mean, a Dog House hamburger is mostly bread. But watching Manny eat—he’s got these fingers that lace together over the top of bread like they’re comfortable there. He’s got his elbows propped on the table and a loose hug on this hamburger, and he looks happy, a boy with an appetite and the time to enjoy it, the way he watched me over that bread—and talked nonstop—and sort of just chewed at the same time, and smiled, and never offered me a bite. The way his jaw worked—man-faced muscles popping near his ears, some secret jaw action communicating something to the brain, and from the look in his eyes it could’ve been something dirty, like that meal was an illegal thing. I mean, he knew how to get a girl’s attention.

  I watched him all that year, and he watched me back. Then one night—this was when I was fourteen—he called me on the phone. “Hey, Brenda, you know who this is?”

  “Yeah, I know who this is.”

  “This is Manuelito, in case you don’t know.”

  “I do know.”

  He wanted to know what I was doing.

  What I was doing was watching my dad be a stone in his chair. Mama had been telling him that there was nothing for her to do in the sticks. She wanted to take a correspondence course and become an interior decorator. My dad had been telling her how easy it was for people to hoodwink her, how she was a pushover for scams, and she was saying, “Daniel, this is a fully accredited correspondence course,” and he was saying, “We been down that road before.” Daddy thought if Mama really wanted something to do, she could come out and do the books at the mill. When he said that, she said, “Oh, happy day,” and he stopped talking. Now he was just sitting there, and my mom was asking if she was part of his scenery. “Am I a tree?” she said, and raised her arms and fluttered her fingers.

  I told Manny I was watching my mom be a tree.

  Manny said, “Sneak out, and let’s go for a drive.”

  So I went to bed early and sneaked out the window, and we went driving around, looking for action, but there wasn’t any, so we sneaked back in through the garage. My dad had converted one quarter of the garage to a playroom. Everybody was asleep at the other end of the house and couldn’t hear us out there. I got whiskey from dad’s stockpile. Daddy laid in a stash once a month since you couldn’t buy it legal on the reservation. Manny and me drank the whiskey with Coca-Cola, listened to KWIK, and sort of played on the couch.

  At first, I was nervous. Manny wasn’t. “Nobody knows I’m here,” he said. “We won’t get caught.” He sang along with the radio—“Don’t let me cross over . . . love’s cheating line”—just singing in my ear, and I’m laughing, you know, and Manny’s trying to find his way through my clothes, and what are you going to do? He had this way of getting around me.

  Playing on the couch was what we liked best that winter, but then, my dad walked in on us once—I guess maybe I didn’t have a shirt on—and Daddy was pale, and kicked Manny out, and told me I was grounded for the rest of my life. Manny wasn’t afraid of my dad. He joked, and my dad heard this—“Hey, Brenda, if you ever get off the ground again, come on over.”

  I was seventeen when I married Manny. My dad didn’t come to the wedding. We got married in the little hundred-year-old Catholic church the Franciscans built. Mama cried all through it, loud and soggy, and every time Father Bernard turned his back, Manny whispered words from Johnny Cash’s song “Mama Cried” and I was cracking up.

  Daddy didn’t come to the wedding, but he came to the church. When we went out, he was sitting on the steps. He didn’t speak to me; he spoke to Manny. He said, “You’re going to need a job.” He told Manny if he wanted a job, he had one at the mill. Manny thought that was real nice. He invited Daddy to come over to the chapter house for mutton and fry-bread.

  Daddy eyeballed him, then me, then started walking toward the car.

  “You don’t like mutton?” Manny said.

  Daddy looked back. “We’ll start you out on the graveyard shift,” he said. “Eleven to seven.”

  Manny said, “I don’t mind the grave.”

  Daddy shook his head. I know what he was thinking. He was thinking Manny had an attitude problem.

  I said, “He’s just kidding.”

  Daddy said, “I better not find him drinking up there.”

  We lived in a house on Manny’s aunt’s property, back behind the company houses, right up against the bluffs. There was an old graveyard up there. Once, when we’d only been married a few months, Manny and me were walking up there. It was cold that day, November, and the sand was blowing, that fine grit that gets between your teeth. It was fenced off, but you could lift the barbed wire and climb in. Navajo graveyards are raggedy places, full of tumbleweeds. There were no headstones, but wooden crosses here and there, and in two or three places, plastic flowers. I didn’t think anybody got buried there anymore. You couldn’t tell who had been buried there because there were no names on the crosses. When we were kids we joked about robbing those graves—we company kids always played cops and robbers on the bluffs—and we believed that if anyone actually did rob an Indian grave he would get something, because we’d heard the Navajos buried people with all their wealth, jewelry, and blankets. But once I stepped on a grave, and the ground was rotten and my foot fell through. I touched a casket. It scared me. “I thought I touched bone,” I told Manny the day we went up there. I hadn’t been there since I was thirteen.

  “You could have broken a leg,” he said.

  “I know it.”

  “You ever seen those old Navajo women that limp around?” he said. “My grandmother limps. Some say they used to break a girl’s hip when she was a baby so she couldn’t work. It’s because the Utes would steal a Navajo girl and sell her for profit, but not if she couldn’t work.”

  “That’s cruel,” I said.

 
; “It was cruel,” he said. “I don’t know who came up with that idea. I hate it that they broke my grandmother’s hip. But I would break yours,” he said.

  “Why don’t you run across that graveyard for me?”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  Manny put his boot on one strand of the barbed-wire fence. He pulled another up with his hands making a gap big enough for a person to enter.

  “You want to,” he said. Manny wasn’t teasing. He was like that. One minute he was joking around, the next, this stranger. His face was pasty, almost white, like he had painted it.

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  He said, “Rim across the fucking graveyard, or I’ll break your fucking hip.”

  You know, there’s no place else to go, really, up there. It’s just a row of bluffs, sand pile after sand pile, maybe a child on a horse and the child’s sheepdogs that will tear you limb from limb. Up on the bluffs there’s no place, really, to go.

  “It’s just a game,” he said, and he didn’t care that I didn’t want to, but pushed me through the barbed wire, and my arm ripped from one barb. Once when we were making love, Manny had stopped and said, “You know, I could take your clothes and put you outside and then everybody would see you. You want everybody to see you?” I felt so cold when he said that. I didn’t want him to touch me anymore, and I pushed him away and said I didn’t want to finish it. Manny thought this was hilarious. He lay on his back and laughed at the ceiling until I tried to choke him, and he thought that was even funnier, and I laughed right back until I was dead with screaming at him.

  That day on the bluffs I felt as though he’d put me naked on the other side of the door. I was afraid of him that day, so all I wanted to do was turn around, walk through the barbed wire, through him, through the whole damn reservation, but he twisted me around and whispered, “Run or I’ll break your fucking hip.”

  I walked. Manny had yelled, “Do I have to come in there?” and then I couldn’t move. Manny yelled, “Jump.” I’m standing in the middle of this graveyard. My husband is telling me to jump up and down. He says he wants to see if I’ll fall through.