A town called why, p.13
A Town Called Why, page 13
It’s their infected nature. His grandfather never whined about anything—except maybe the whiners, and of course every single pathetic fucking thing the fucking whiners were whining about.
Fuck ’em.”
He’s having a little trouble keeping his focus, which he knows he has to do. He knows his plans for later, but not for right now. He will though. That’s the way it always is.
And it comes to him. It’s as if he has a guiding force inside him—and he never questions it. You don’t need some fucking intervention to know what works.
He floors it to get there faster.
• • •
“I’m doing most of the talking,” says Frank Gaines to Maira Corri. “That’s not what usually happens.” He takes in an exaggerated, sibilant breath. “I don’t mean ‘usually.’ … That is … I didn’t mean to say I make a habit of meeting women … although … What are you laughing at?”
“I don’t know,” says Maira. “I’ve just got a soft spot for guys who hem and haw … like they were still …”
“What?”
“You know … pretty young.”
He turns both of his palms upward and smiles uncertainly. “Yeah, well, I guess there are worse things than … young.”
She looks over his shoulder. “Right, worse things.” She strokes a forefinger over an eyebrow, then looks back at him as if she has a question she doesn’t know how to ask. Finally, she frowns, half-smiles and shrugs.
Gaines clasps his hands together and shrugs too. He feels a pressure to say something; he’s not sure what, but dives in anyway. “I have a … a friend who says—a very smart friend, I think—who says it’s really important to hang onto a lot of those things about ourselves, I mean the good ways of being we had when we were young, when we didn’t close down so easily. I don’t mean to try to recapture our youth, but … He frowns. “Of course, the other side of it is …”
He looks into middle distance. What the hell am I talking about? “… The other side of it is … like maybe something happened to you a long time ago, and now you’re carrying this old wound around, and then something happens to you now that reminds you of that first thing; then you tighten up now,” he says, “even though the thing you’re tightening up about happened … you know, ages ago.”
“Wow. You don’t do the usual barroom chitchat.” To his surprise, she’s smiling, at ease again.
“Don’t I? I don’t know … I mean I really don’t know.” He tries to pick up his thread … or any thread at all. “And then sometimes you can learn a lot, listening to what people have to say while they’re busy trying to loosen themselves up …” He frowns and looks at Phil, drawing several glasses of beer from the tap. “… Of course the trick is to figure out what you’ve learned, and not to be so loosened up yourself that you suddenly realize you’re doing all the talking …” Maira grins. “… and that without knowing it, you’ve gone … all dumb as a stump.”
Maira laughs. He shrugs.
Maira holds one hand out across the table. Gaines frowns at her and says, “What are you…?” He blinks, reaches over and takes her hand.
“You’re a nice man,” she says.
“How would you know that?”
She smiles. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I know anything I know. I just make my best guess and hope I’m right. Are you a nice man?”
Gaines gazes at her. “Not sure. I hope so. I’d like to think I was.”
“Yeah. … Me too, she says. “I mean about me.”
• • •
Sunny and Shana stand on Shana’s front step, looking out at the glittering desert. Sunny’s car is parked fifty feet away. Geneva is still asleep in the passenger seat.
“Would you talk with her when she wakes up?” says Sunny.
“Is it permitted?”
Sunny feels a sardonic laugh inside that doesn’t make it as far as the expression on her face. The notion that her grandmother would ask her what is permitted is comical. It reminds Sunny of how helpless she is, how devoid of answers that might actually mend people. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says. “She needs help. And she’s not getting it from me.”
She hands something to Shana. “It’s star stone.”
“I know. I just wanted you to know.”
Sunny shakes her head. “You drive me nuts.”
“It’s a little hidden sometimes,” says Shana, “but you know all that I know, and more. You just don’t always understand that you do. Come inside. I’ll give you a cup of tea.” She looks at Sunny’s car. “She’ll be all right.”
Inside, Sunny looks again at Shana’s framed charcoal drawing of Cochise, not based on a photograph because there are no known photos of Cochise. Sunny remembers the yellowed newspaper clipping a friend of hers used to have framed on her wall, next to another artistic rendering of Cochise. It featured a quotation many Apache will never forget:
“From the time of the Gadsden Purchase, when we came into possession of their country, until about ten years ago, the Apaches were the friends of the Americans. Much of the time since then, the attempt to exterminate them has been carried on at a cost of from three to four millions of dollars per annum, with no appreciable progress made in accomplishing their extermination.” —VINCENT COLYER, Secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners—1871
“You knew it was Jason Flint who stole the land, didn’t you?” says Sunny.
“I knew,” says Shana.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“There was no point at the time. What do you plan to do?”
Sunny shrugs. “Go on living.”
“That can be tricky.”
• • •
Despite the rage she’d come to feel most of the time toward Uncle Willie after he moved away, Mercy Ranaldi realized there was a downside to his banishment from her life. She had learned more about the world she lived in from him than almost anyone else. Her job on the reservation came from Uncle Willie’s connections. He was a know-it-all, but there were times when what Uncle Willie knew, especially about Southeast Arizona, gave her a feeling of understanding the world she lived in.
There were many complex sides to Uncle Willie. She remembers a recurring dream that takes place in the kitchen. … Why the kitchen? She’s never known for sure. Uncle Willie did most of the cooking when she was very young. Maybe she started having that dream because she liked being in the kitchen, and Uncle Willie was usually there too.
But after a while, she’s not sure how long, she began to wish he would find someplace else to go—not all the time; she did love Uncle Willie, and she knew the kitchen was Uncle Willie’s shelter, and hers. He once whispered to her that it was their special place.
He liked holding her and telling her stories, usually in the kitchen. They were good stories. He loved to talk about the Apaches, their intelligence and courage. He regaled her with lore from the Chiricahua Apache culture. He knew everything about Cochise, the greatest Chiricahua chief. Cochise said, “You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight into our hearts.” Uncle Willie told her Cochise said those words, even though a lot of people, especially white men, had not spoken straight to him.
“The Americans came from the east,” he told her. “They had arrived on the continent only a few decades earlier, but they kept coming, nonstop, in droves, and these white men said, ‘This is our land. Get off or we’ll kill you.’ And the Apache said, ‘Why don’t we have a little powwow about that’?”
Willie loved, with a passion, stories about fairness and justice.
“Cochise,” he said, “their leader for most of the ‘Indian Wars’ with the United States, never told a lie. He also never extended mercy to those who did. He never broke a promise, and he never told on people—like some ungrateful little kids might do if they aren’t taught better.”
Willie was the first one to talk to her about spiritual matters. He told her, “Fear hath torment, but perfect love casteth out fear.” And: “I am come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly.” She never understood why he told her those things, but Willie laughed, smiled understandingly, and said, “Most things in life cannot be explained in words” (even though he talked nonstop). “Words are material,” he told her. “The deepest thoughts, the most important ones, can only be expressed in very human ways”—but, he added, it could be “very dangerous and wicked to tell the wrong people how you … or I express those ways.” He never explained how it could be dangerous, but Mercy supposed it didn’t matter because by the time she’d really thought about it, it had become second nature to keep her thoughts about their special times together to herself. And since she’d soon forgotten most of it anyway, it didn’t seem to matter.
Willie knew a lot about life—but not always as much as he thought he did.
There were times when, underneath, Uncle Willie felt to her a lot like the two-faced white men he described in the local Native Americans stories she’d always loved, especially the ones about Apache retribution for the crimes of the white man. She couldn’t wait for story time … except there were moments, only once in a while at first, that she started feeling enclosed and angry, and all she wanted was to get out of the kitchen.
That feeling seemed to be at the root of the recurring dream she started having. That dream began to scratch at her mind more and more and to pull her in different directions all at once. Sometimes, it made her angrier than she could say. The kitchen had always been a nice, warm place to be. She didn’t have that anymore. It began to feel as if a lot of things had been jerked away from her.
If only Uncle Willie had not needed to be such an expert on every single freaking thing in life—especially her life, maybe Mercy never would have started feeling angry at him so often. If he hadn’t tried that hard to be … someone else with her. He used to say, “Somebody has to play the role of daddy in your life; it might as well be me.” In her dream—and later in the rest of her life—she feels sometimes as if she’s in a tiny room and it keeps getting smaller and smaller, and she wants to scream, and something with snakeskin like a carpenter’s rasp is crawling through her insides; and a lot of times, she wakes up from that dream feeling as if screaming isn’t enough, that she wants to kill … something, strangle it with her bare hands.
Uncle Willie loved the word mercy—even though at certain moments, he seemed to have a strange definition of it. Mercy’s mother Louise had at one time worshipped her big brother, and since there was no father around to put in his two cents, she named her daughter Mercy.
By the time she was a young teenager, Mercy had figured out that her mother was crazy. Her uncle was crazy too, and too often loved hearing himself talk, but Uncle Willie had a sense of ethics, which he often reminded her about. Mercy, who understood deep down that some shallow people might see her as having a few mental issues of her own (maybe a little like her uncle), had worked very hard to find confidence in her new way of looking at the world. It was at least partly inspired by her eccentric uncle—even though, when she finally started to grow up, she realized she way preferred her own wisdom to his.
But he never treated her as if she was stupid like her mother did. The other parts … the parts she doesn’t remember too well, were best left unremembered anyway. There’s never any good in digging up the past.
She had mixed feelings about Uncle Willie’s exit from her life.
Both times.
15
In the buried twists and turns of the journey into and out the other side of childhood and adolescence that Gaines has dug up for the first time talking to Sunny Kacheenay, he has uncovered no memory of feelings like the ones he’s had in Stan’s Saloon tonight, talking to Maira Corri. He’s been fascinated. At the same time, he has felt like a babbling idiot with her—although he recognizes this means nothing; he’s always thought of himself as having the gift of a staggering inability to understand women.
And that has always been a paradox for him because he has, for as long as he can remember, had a passion, a weakness, a blindness with girls, with women, with all things feminine, girlish, womanly—delicate things, pink, graceful, lacy, tender. At the same time, his ardor for independent women—the sages and mystics, queens and huntresses, the Steel Magnolias, all the archetypes of femininity—is no less potent. He remembers an old line from he has no idea where:
A woman who has wisdom about the sexes (if such a person exists) is asked what a woman has to do to turn a man on.
“Show up,” she says.
Before Gaines started belching out almost everything that in the old days had only occupied the unconscious regions of his psyche, it would never have occurred to him to identify such thoughts. He wishes he wasn’t so much owned by that part of himself. At the same time, he would hate to lose the stimulation, the exhilaration of those feelings he now understands have always been in him, as much as he would hate to live without the promise of tomorrow, the look of joyful dismay on a child’s face, or maybe just a strain of music with a twisting rhyme you never would have expected.
It troubles him briefly that his mother now crosses his mind, but he forgets it, supposing in his new tolerance of his peculiarities or whatever you call what he’s got, that it’s all right that someone arouses in him a tenderness that reminds him of his mother. What the hell’s wrong with that? is the question and answer in one that flits through his mind as he watches Maira now, playing with Lyle in his living room.
A little the worse—or possibly better, who can say—for alcohol and coffee, it occurs to him that she has an uncommon honesty, a lack of trying to impress a man she’s just met, apparently not needing to make believe she’s anything she’s not. Something about her almost studied lack of restraint, after you break the ice with her, is very sexy.
It’s not that she doesn’t have the usual stuff that turns him on—the body, the booty, the certain smell, the look that takes him to that funny place where, for the moment at least, he can’t think of anything but being with that woman.
But beneath all those sensations, and he’s been fooled by them more than he wants to think about, there is something in Maira Corri that makes him feel ... at home.
A look of disgust with himself comes and goes, as he watches her scratch Lyle behind his ears and stroke his muzzle, and he guesses he has no control over such feelings, no idea how “sexy” and “at home” can fit into the same flowerpot.
But what the hell does he know—except that he likes it?
He sits on the sofa, close to her. “Lyle doesn’t take to everybody,” he says.
A smile lights up Maira’s face. “He does seem to like me, huh?”
“Sometimes I think he knows the good ones from ...” He studies her, puzzled at the rest of his thought. “... the bad ones.”
• • •
Mr. Flint came to me in the nighttime. He only came at times when Louise had drunk herself to sleep and it was dark out. To be honest, I’m not sure he wanted anyone to know that he was “seeing me.” … I had a relationship with him that was unlike anything I’d ever dreamed of. I think it’s fair to say that even though we hurt each other, we also loved each other, in our special style. … Okay, let me put it this way—in our unique manner of doing things together, I was his equal, and I think deep down he wanted that. He told me the others were jellyfish next to me.
And yes, I suppose by the time everything happened he was a little afraid of me. I was never frightened of him. I knew he was scared to do me any real damage. I knew a little about damage, how to receive it, and survive it, and how to administer it, and “my friend” was frankly out of his league with me. I think he knew that. It gave me a spectacular feeling of … call it transcendence. I already knew he was nowhere near my spiritual equal, and although I understand it doesn’t sound exactly righteous (which I never stop trying to be), it did give me that wonderful feeling you get when you know you’ve risen above the rest—all of them. You could call it “ascendancy.” There’s no feeling like it. Once you’ve found the person you can come to that passionate mutual awareness with, you never want to let him go.
But someone—if anyone was able to peek over my shoulder—might want to know about the three of us—me, Mr. Flint, and Uncle Willie. The two of them had only met one time before the night it happened.
I should add that neither the first nor the final of the two times Mr. Flint and Uncle Willie were in the same room together did anyone I was aware of know anything about it. Neither time did anyone, except Jimmy Sunrich, know that Uncle Willie had even arrived in town. He never stayed with us when he came to Arizona, his feelings being what they were about my mother, and by that time, vice versa. Also, he and Jimmy Sunrich had a thing between them. They had gotten together, I guess, before Uncle Willie moved away to Wisconsin, where he lived near a Pawnee reservation. He seemed to have a thing for Native American boys (and girls—and God knows what else). I once threatened to tell people that he was gay. Uncle Willie just laughed at me; it wasn’t unkindly, but he kind of chortled and said, “You of all people.”
I said, “What’s that mean?” He just waved it off and told me, “Nobody cares about sexuality anymore, Spoonful. You’re thinking about last century. Everybody knows Jimmy Sunrich is counterfeit money, and I certainly don’t care—especially anymore—about what everyday straights think of me. For Jimmy’s part, the Apaches have way bigger fish to fry than worrying whether somebody thinks they’re queer or not. I’m talking mostly about white people. It might matter a little more among his own, but apparently Jimmy knows how to handle that. Most people couldn’t care less anymore whether you sleep with girls or boys or whatever’s grazing in the meadow that day. Grow up, Spoon. Didn’t I teach you anything?”
