The dividing line, p.2
The Dividing Line, page 2
“You wanted the Wild West and wide open spaces, Mr. Rabb,” Mr. Hendly said with a shrug. “Well, here they are.” He spread his arms out expansively around him. “I guess Tucson ain’t exactly what ya’d expect from the movies. It’s just a little town with twenty-five thousand Meskin Catholics and fifteen thousand redneck Baptists like me, and we don’t do much mixin with the few thousand Papagos who was here a long time before any of us.” His voice was tinged with sarcasm. “‘Ceptin me ‘n you, a course, cause it’s our job.”
Hanna stood in stony dejection. Tears streamed down Adam’s dusty cheeks.
Mr. Hendly’s voice softened, lost its acerbic edge. He turned to Adam. “I got a son just your age. He’ll be goin with you to school next year, but he ain’t got many friends. Tough to, you know, ‘cause we live so far outta town here. And it’s mostly just Meskins out here anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders resignedly. “He’s sure been anxious to meet you. Why don’t you come on over to the house with me and meet him?”
“Go on,” Joshua prodded gently.
“I have to help unpack,” Adam mumbled, clinging more tightly to Hanna’s hand. He wiped the tears from his cheeks.
“Naw, that’s okay. Hanna and I can do it just fine. You run along now. Come on home around six, and we’ll see about going out somewhere nice for dinner.”
Adam frowned and then nodded his head in reluctant obedience. His sneakers scuffed up little explosions of dust as he walked up the road with Mr. Hendly.
Joshua turned to Hanna and tried to smile reassuringly. He watched her walk toward the car, and he felt suddenly guilty, selfish, for bringing her to this wasteland. This should be her time for parties and sock hops and boys. Those lissome legs, the flowering body of a woman. She was a real beauty. But he had brought her here to a yard full of dirty white chickens and choking dust and searing heat and nothing. He shook his head slowly and pursed his lips as she walked disconsolately to the trunk of the car to help unload the suitcases.
But despite the initial shock of it, Joshua knew that he needed this place: the hot sun and the clear dry air and the cleanness of the unbounded desert, empty of memories of Rachel and Brooklyn and all the things that were gone and unrecoverable. Those memories had almost destroyed him.
He had gone to a bar near Prospect Park one night after work, and he had drunk too much, much too much. He saw a woman sitting at the bar who looked like his wife, the same brown hair and complexion, the same slope to her bare shoulders, and he went over to her to talk. But she was sitting with a man, whom somehow Joshua didn’t notice, and when Joshua sat down and said, “Hello, Rachel,” the man got up from his barstool and came around to him and said, “Hey, gimp, you don’t just walk up to Betty without you pay me ten bucks first.”
Joshua had hit him so hard that he knocked out three teeth and broke his nose and lower jaw, breaking two fingers on his own hand. Joshua’s father had to go to the jail at four in the morning and pay a $168 fine for drunk and disorderly. Luckily, it was a pimp that Joshua had hospitalized, so nobody pressed charges. And Joshua and his father had ridden morosely back to Brighton Beach in an almost-deserted subway train, and his father said that Joshua ought to get out of Brooklyn, go somewhere new and fresh where he wasn’t haunted every day by memories of the past. And Joshua grudgingly agreed. He felt like he was dying here; he was bitter and angry and had forgotten how to smile and enjoy anything. And when they got back to the apartment, Joshua’s mother reluctantly said the same thing. She didn’t want him to take the kids away, away from them and Brooklyn and their school and their friends, but she knew that it had to be because Joshua wouldn’t leave them behind. But he was troubled in a way that wasn’t suddenly and miraculously going to clear up with a couple of pills and magic potions, and they all knew it. And if he didn’t go away it might get worse. God only knew what he might do, what might happen. There was a raw corrosive violence in him that was frightening. So Joshua had talked to Phil Rourke, one of the veterans hospital orthopedic surgeons, who said he knew a doctor at the VA in Tucson, had served with him in England during the war. Phil contacted the doctor, and within weeks, Joshua had a lead on a lawyering job. The Tucson office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Office of Land Management needed a lawyer to do part-time work in exchange for a modest salary and free rent on a small house attached to the bureau. It was at least a start, and part of the deal was that he could use his office the rest of the time to try to build up a private practice. And there was plenty of room on the property for raising chickens and having a goat for milk and a few rows of carrots and lettuce and onions. Just what Joshua needed. Get some mud under his fingernails. Get plenty of warm dry air into his chest, and sunshine to burn his memories to dust.
The Hendly house was a large square adobe building directly behind the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The house was at least three times larger than Adam’s new home. Behind it was a rickety wooden shed with a corrugated tin roof.
Inside the shed, a shaggy-haired blond boy was curry combing a huge dappled-gray horse. Mr. Hendly made a two-word introduction, “Jimmy, Adam,” and walked back toward the bureau. The boys cocked their heads slightly and appraised each other.
Jimmy was wearing a faded pair of Levi’s tucked into high-topped cowboy boots of tan suede calfskin, a red-and-blue-and-yellow-plaid cowboy shirt with pointed snap pocket flaps, and a battered brown felt cowboy hat. Sweat had stained and soaked the hatband so often that the lower part of the crown was dirty black. The horse appeared to be sleeping on its feet, head down, eyes closed, its skin rippling beneath the stiff bristles of the curry.
“Charger,” Jimmy said importantly. “He used to belong to the Seventh Army down on the Mexican border by Bisbee. Now they use jeeps, so Dad got him for me.
“Can I comb him?” Adam asked.
“Sure. Here,” Jimmy said, handing him the curry. “Where you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Where’s ‘at?”
“Next to New York.”
Jimmy looked puzzled. He screwed up freckly cheeks and squinted in thought. “I thought Pennsylvania was next to New York.”
Adam stuck out his chin. “Well, so’s Brooklyn.”
Jimmy still looked a little skeptical. “Y’ever ride a horse?”
“Sure I did. Lots.”
“Wanna ride him?”
Adam wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t know how. “I don’t have boots or nothing,” he said.
“Aw, that’s okay. I ain’t got no saddle, so you gotta ride him bareback anyway. And all I got for a bridle’s a hackamore.”
Jimmy went to the corner of the shed and pulled a rope hackamore off a nail on the wall. The bitless bridle fit loosely over the horse’s head and had a single rope rein below the jaw. He handed the end of the six-foot rein to Adam, and Adam led the listless horse out of the stall.
“Let’s go over to Lourdes Hill,” Jimmy said.
“Where’s it at?”
“Right next to the mission yonder.” Jimmy pointed to the small hill to the left of San Xavier Mission.
“We aren’t supposed to go there. Your dad said not to.”
“Whattaya, fraidycat? Just ‘cause some Indian girl got drownded, my dad gets all upset. But I ain’t scared.”
“I’m not neither scared,” Adam said indignantly. “But your dad said that girl might’ve been murdered and we can’t go over there ‘cause it’s dangerous.” Adam stopped walking, and Charger immediately lowered his head and snorted and closed his eyes, asleep on his feet.
“How’s he gonna find out, less’n you tell him?” Jimmy eyed Adam belligerently.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Adam said, his eyes flashing with the insult.
“Okay then, let’s go. I’ll get my gun.”
“Wow, you got a gun?” For the first time, Adam was truly impressed.
“Sure I do. All us guys do. It’s a Daisy.”
Jimmy walked back inside the shed and came out a moment later with the BB gun. Adam’s eyes were riveted on it. It was a beauty, lever action, sleek black steel with a shiny brown wooden stock, just like one of those Winchesters the cowboys always had in the movies.
“Can I hold it?” Adam asked.
“You sure you know how?” It wasn’t a question, it was a challenge.
“Sure I do!” Adam said, putting just enough petulance in his voice to be convincing but not sound like a liar. He had once shot Johnny Rivkin’s Daisy, under the boardwalk on Brighton Beach. Got a sea gull that was sleeping in the nook of two support beams.
He dropped Charger’s reins, and Jimmy handed him the BB gun. Adam fondled it lovingly, fitting his hand around the neck of the stock. He put his index finger into the trigger housing and squeezed the trigger gingerly.
“Come on,” Jimmy said, taking the air rifle back. “We’ll go hunt buffalo.”
“Buffalo? There’s buffalo here?” Adam’s eyes widened.
“You’ll see,” Jimmy said. A knowing smirk wrinkled his cheeks.
Adam stood beside the drowsing horse, whose back was way over Adam’s head, and he wondered how he was going to get up. Jimmy came over to him and made a step by interlacing his fingers. Adam put his left foot into the step, and Jimmy heaved him up onto Charger’s swayback. Adam swung his right leg over, steadied himself upright, and couldn’t help smiling smugly at his accomplishment.
Jimmy led the way through a rocky field of sparse mesquite. Recent monsoon rains had given life to straggly clumps of bear grass and careless weed and occasional wildflowers. The ground had dried and cracked and curled like old leather. The boys picked their way through the mile-wide field and came to the irrigation canal.
Charger began climbing reluctantly down the steep side of the ditch, snorting, puffing, and he lowered his head and minced downward with short jerky steps. Adam clung hard with his knees to the horse’s fat sides, but he began to slide forward over the horse’s lowered neck. He gripped a handful of mane, but it didn’t help. He slid straight down the neck and toppled over the horse’s head onto the edge of the ditch bottom. He got up quickly and rubbed his muddy knees, embarrassed to look at Jimmy, who was whooping with laughter on the other bank. Charger kept on walking, oblivious to anything but getting out of the ditch.
“Gotta hold on good ‘n tight when a horse lowers his head and goes downhill,” said Jimmy.
They walked a half mile across a barren field to a cemetery about a hundred yards square. It was half full of six-foot-long mounds headed by whitewashed wooden crosses. Many of the mounds were studded with bunches of cut flowers, merry white chrysanthemums and Vermillion hibiscus and yellow daisies. The cemetery was surrounded by an old barbed-wire fence that had long since fallen into disrepair. The wood staves lay decaying on the ground. Strands of barbed wire were embedded in the soil, and the barbs stuck up in bunches like small patches of thorns.
Adam gave Jimmy a leg up on Charger, and they trudged around the cemetery to the dirt road that led in front of the mission to Lourdes Hill. No one was around. They passed the small igloolike houses of bear grass woven around frames of ocotillo staves. In the distance were occasional low square houses of adobe. Unfenced chickens clucked and strutted, pecking at the ground. A few goats lay motionlessly under lean-tos, chewing their cud, staring placidly at the boys and the horse.
The front of the mission was an ornate brown plaster façade framing two heavy wooden doors. The rest of the mission was white stucco. One of the two tall church steeples was topped with a round plaster cap and a tall black steel cross. The other steeple lacked the cap and spire, as though the construction had never been finished.
They walked past the mission and up the ten-foot-wide path on Lourdes Hill. A pair of bronze lions sat on two tall cement pillars as they reached the top of the hill.
“There’s the buffalo,” Jimmy said.
“Where at?” Adam asked.
“Down yonder, by the Santa Cruz River.” Jimmy pointed with his BB gun a few hundred yards away toward a quarter-mile-long thin strip of green along the western bank of the riverbed.
Grazing on the thin green patch of earth were two scrawny brown cows. Just beyond them past a bow in the river were several tall cranes and great clouds of billowing dust from some excavation in the riverbed which Adam and Jimmy couldn’t see. The noise from the excavation was barely audible, muffled by the distance.
“They don’t look like buffalo to me,” Adam said.
“What’s a guy from Brooklyn know?” Jimmy dug his boot heels into Charger’s sides, and the horse walked slowly toward the river. Adam walked beside the horse.
About thirty yards from the stolidly grazing cows, Jimmy let out a war whoop and kicked Charger hard. The horse began loping toward the cows, who looked up at the unwelcome intruder with huge startled brown eyes. Jimmy took aim at the first cow and shot it in the rump. Adam could hear the compressed air expel from the barrel, and he saw the cow whip its tail around like it was flicking flies. Charger passed the cows ten yards away at a slow, arthritic gallop. Jimmy cocked the rifle and shot at the second cow and missed. Charger circled around for another pass at the unhappy quarry. The cows began trotting away from the horse, up the riverbank toward the dust clouds of the excavation. Jimmy loped beside them and shot the trailing one in the shoulder. It flinched and began running faster.
Jimmy reined in Charger and walked the snorting horse back to Adam. The cows reached the edge of the straggly Bermuda grass pasture and stopped running. They stood looking warily at the boys and the horse.
“You wanna take a couple a shots?” Jimmy asked, climbing down from Charger.
“Yeah, I guess,” Adam said, not enthusiastic for the cow hunt, which seemed kind of cruel, but he was dying to get his hands on the BB gun.
Jimmy climbed down from Charger and gave Adam a leg up. Adam steadied himself and Jimmy handed him the BB gun. Just the touch of it was enough to make a guy smile. He spread his legs and brought them into the horse’s sides with a loud thump. Charger snorted resignedly and began trotting toward the cows. Adam took aim with the BB gun at the lead cow, but the gun was going up and down, and he couldn’t control the horse with the rein in his left hand and shoot anything just using his right. The horse passed fifteen yards away from the wary tail-flicking cows and stopped at the end of the pasture. Adam turned in the saddle and shot at a cow. The BB struck it in the withers, and the cow turned and started running down the pasture toward the irrigation ditch.
Feeling like Buffalo Bill, Adam walked Charger back to Jimmy and slid down from the horse. “You see me get him that last time?” Adam gushed, handing the rein to Jimmy.
“Hey, you boys!” came a high-pitched woman’s voice from the direction of Lourdes Hill.
“Aw cripes! Old lady Antone,” Jimmy said. “Them’re her cows. Let’s get outta here!”
A large Indian woman in a shapeless faded brown sack dress with gray stringy hair bouncing around her shoulders came running toward them wielding a long broom. “I tell you plenny times, stay away my stock!” she screamed, now only fifteen yards away. “I tell you father, you Hendly som bitch!”
There was no time to remount Charger. Jimmy started running toward the irrigation ditch, holding hard onto the horse’s rein. It was about 150 yards away, and Adam reached it first, panting for breath, clutching the BB gun protectively in front of him with both hands like a priest with a golden chalice. It took Jimmy and Charger another couple of minutes. The old Papago woman was far in the distance, standing with her broom laid back over one shoulder.
“Is she gonna tell on us?” Adam asked as Jimmy came up.
Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and took the gun from Adam. “So what?” he said.
“My dad might murder me,” Adam said.
“Quit bein a chicken. He ain’t gonna find out.”
They crossed the muddy ditch near Indian Agency Road. Hanna was standing by the chicken coops and saw Adam cross the ditch just fifty yards away. And then he saw her, standing there with her hands on her hips, staring at him, and he had the sudden impulse to run back down into the ditch and hide. But then Jimmy would laugh and call him a fraidycat. So he trudged reluctantly toward his new home, his face down.
As he reached the house, Hanna came up and stood stiffly in front of him. He shuffled to a stop and raised his face and met her hard stare. Ever since Mommy had died, Hanna had taken upon herself the responsibility of being Adam’s mother.
“You were over there on the reservation, even though Mr. Hendly told you you couldn’t go there.” She wagged her finger at him accusatorily.
“No, I wasn’t,” he mumbled.
“Don’t lie, Adam!”
“Well, Jimmy made me go,” he whined.
“Did he tie you up and drag you there?”
Adam lowered his face.
“You have to start acting like a man, Adam,” she scolded him gently. “Daddy’s sick and you can’t upset him.”
“Are you saying Daddy’s still crazy?” He studied his big sister carefully, a little fear showing in his eyes.
“No, not crazy,” she said, not wanting to frighten him, and knowing that he didn’t fully understand. “He’s just real worn out emotionally from the war, you know, and Mommy dying. He’s real nervous and frazzled.”
“Yeah, I know,” Adam mumbled. “He’s been writing in that book of his, like he did a couple of months ago when he was acting real strange. Sometimes he spends hours writing in it.”
Hanna’s face was grave.
Adam studied his sister. “You think he’ll be okay?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know. But you’ve got to act right and not worry him by doing bad things.”
He hung his head again and walked into the house. His father was sweeping the rough wood living room floor when Adam walked in.
“You meet Jimmy?” his father asked.
“Yeah, sure. He’s got a horse and a BB gun.”
“You get to ride the horse?”
“Yeah, it was really neat.”
