As You Were Page 5

  Defeated, the director returns to Hollywood.

  A year later, behind schedule and way over budget, the director, cast, and crew come back to the desert. This time, however, before the first day of filming, the director sends security to find the old Indian man, which takes a day or two, but they do find him, and they do bring him to the set. The director says to the old Indian man, “Chief, I want to offer you a job. Do you want a job?”

  “Yah,” the old Indian man says. “Course.”

  “Okay,” says the director. “Tell me, what’s the weather going to

  do?”

  “Don’t know,” says the old Indian man. “Radio broke.”

  Dad knows no other way to teach you Indians aren’t magical or mystical, despite what the TV and the teacher who made you read The Indian in the Cupboard taught you.

  A group of friends want to go out West and hunt buffalo. They find a brochure saying there must be at least four in the group, not including their guide. And they must hunt on horseback. They all want the authentic experience, so they hire an Indian guide.

  He comes cheap, he travels light. He doesn’t even need a saddle.

  He takes them across the prairie, talks about how much meat each man will get for their families, how the hide can be used to keep them warm and clothed, turned into moccasins, tipis, blankets, leather for saddles, how the bones can be carved to make knives or boiled to make glue, even the scrotum can be turned into a canteen for carrying water, how the horns and hooves can be used to drink from, how the sinew should not be wasted—even in today’s world. But they see no buffalo their first day and decide to make camp for the night.

  The hunters complain to their guide, and he tells them about Buffalo Bill Cody killing millions of buffalo during the days of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, the treaty they used to put the Plains Indians onto reservations.

  They’re hunting the offspring of the few survivors.

  The following morning, they ride along the ridge and look for the roving herd. But there is no roving herd to be seen. He takes them down a cut and out into the flat grasslands. Eventually, one of the hunters grows agitated and hollers out, “Where are they? I thought you people could talk to animals.” Without a word, the Indian guide stands on his horse’s shoulders and peers off to the horizon. They all stare at the horizon too, trying to see what he is seeing.

  With all the hunters silently watching, mystified, he gets down off his horse and puts his ear to the ground and lets out a sorrowful groan.

  “What? What is it?

  “Buffalo come,” the Indian guide says, saddened.

  “Where? How do you know?” one of the hunters asks.

  “Ear, wet and sticky.”

  Dad knows no other way to teach you the difference between people and animals, but he knows enough to teach you if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.

  He makes sure to point out Buffalo Bill Cody’s house every time you pass, shaking a clenched fist, save his middle finger.

  CITIZEN’S ARREST

  “SEE WHAT THIS GUY’S DOING?” Dad says, and points toward the rearview mirror with his head and lips, hands still at ten and two.

  “The car behind us?”

  “Yeah, the cop.”

  “He’s a cop?” you ask.

  “Look at his headlights, they’re rectangles. Two on each side of the grill. It’s a Dodge Diplomat. You can see them from a mile off without even having to look at the rooftop,” Dad says, wagging his pointer finger to let you know what he’s doing is a no-no. “They try to creep up on motorists at night. Bunch of dumb sons of bitches.”

  This makes you peer into the mirror so you can see for yourself.

  “He’s getting too close to even see his headlights, Dad.”

  “It’s called a speed trap.”

  “He’s going to hurt us.”

  “No, he’s trying to get us to break the speed limit, so he can write us a ticket. It turns into thirty miles an hour up here,” he says, nodding his head down the road toward the off-ramp.

  “Slow down, Dad. Please.”

  You know he’s not listening, so you sit up straight in the seat and grab hold of the handle on the door of the Duster. He’s gunning it, making the engine growl. The rumble under the hood matches the one you know is building inside Dad’s chest. You’ve made him have that same look on his face more times than you could count.

  Once the road begins to curve, and the cop’s headlights disappear from the side view mirror, Dad tromps on the brake and sends his car sliding up the off-ramp.

  In a blink, he throws it in neutral, sets the e-brake, flings the door open, and he’s gone.

  You hear yelling over the engine as it knocks to a stall. The mirror is no help, so you turn around in the seat and get up on your knees, rest your chin on the top of the headrest.

  Through the swirl of red and blue lights, you watch while the deputy gets pulled from his car and tossed to the ground.

  Dad slaps him.

  And slaps him.

  He keeps slapping him with his bare hands, the way he did with you the time at the cabin when you were trying to get away from Grandma, but when you moved the metal chair out of your way and set it back down behind you, one of the feet landed perfectly on her big toe and broke it, blackening it almost instantaneously.

  He keeps slapping him with those paws of his until the deputy curls up into a ball. Dad handcuffs him and crawls into his cruiser and calls his boss to come get him.

  It’s a citizen’s arrest, Dad says.

  Dad isn’t bothered by guns and badges. He reminds Mom of this on the day of their divorce. He tells her if she asks for you, he’ll kill you, her, himself, right then and there in the courtroom. Before the trial began, he makes sure to tell the bailiff, “Mine’s bigger than yours,” eyeballing his waistline. The bailiff is young and dumb and has it in his head Dad is talking about cock size. What he’s too stupid to realize is that Dad’s talking about the caliber of the pistol and the length of the barrel he has tucked into his Wranglers.

  Dad doesn’t get custody of you on account of his history of violent behavior, according to their divorce papers. Mom gets awarded child support, but Dad stops working the very next day, and she never sees a dime. He laughs when he tells you this, says she didn’t know how much money he really made until that day in court.

  It takes Mom about nine months of waitressing and locksmithing and dancing before it gets too cold for you and her and Sam to sleep in the car anymore, so she calls her ex-mother-in-law and asks, “Do you want David for Christmas?”

  “Of course,” Grandma Audrey says. “We’d love to have him.”

  Mom drops you off the next day, two weeks before your birthday. A few weeks later, Grandma Audrey tracks down Mom and asks when she’ll be coming to get you, but what Grandma didn’t understand is that when Mom asked if she’d like you for Christmas, she meant as a Christmas gift.

  THE THINGS THAT COME OUT OF THE CLOSET

  EVERYONE SAID YOU WERE LEFT on Grandma Audrey’s doorstep. Everyone, meaning: Grandma Audrey and Dad. Once upon a time, you believed every word. But wasn’t Oliver Twist left on a doorstep? So was Swee’Pea, right?

  So why not you?

  When questions are first asked concerning your mother’s whereabouts, Grandma says she’s dead. Debbie’s mom died when she was little, which is why she went to live with Grandma. So why not say the same thing about your mother? Moms die in head-on collisions on the freeway. It’s something you learn to accept as a child.

  Dad won’t offer an answer of his own, though you’ve come to conclude everything he spews stinks of bullshit. He once told a story about how when he was five a bully made him get a ball out of the street, and how he got hit by a car and how the car threw him a hundred feet through the air and how he landed in the intersection and how the ambulance got T-boned by a dump truck on the way to the hospital and how he spent the next year in a three-quarter body cast and skull cap—all to explain how he got the tw
o scars on the front of his legs and why he didn’t go to Vietnam like all of your friends’ dads did. But then Grandma shows you the newspaper articles, and Dad shows you a plaster skullcap signed by his whole kindergarten class when they visited him in the hospital, and then you don’t know what to believe when he opens his mouth, so it all becomes fact: The Gospel of Dick.

  Something else Grandma likes to tell you is how “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Dolph Lundgren, they all talk funny ’cause they’re on them steroids.” That’s atop her saying, “Jogging is no good for you because it juggles up your insides.” Now, put the aforementioned alongside how she says, “Jiggaboos are only here for our entertainment. That’s why they’re so good at singing and dancing and sports. That’s why they’re all over the damn television set.” Yet when everyone sets out on the weekly pilgrimage to the Chinese restaurant after church every Sunday, you know better than to pick up the spoon, knife, and fork the waitress brings to the table. You don’t even dare unfurl the napkin wrapped around them. Eating by any other means than chopsticks means a trip to the parking lot. You will not disrespect their culture.

  But if all of this is confusing, it is nowhere as complicated as the first time you see a Black lady at the mall. When you ask her if she is a Goddamned Jew, she knows to not get mad at you. Instead, she scans the crowd of shoppers and asks one or two of the women, “Does this little boy belong to you?” but no one answers her, so you’re left to wander and weave through the maze of clothing racks back to Grandma without further incident.

  Grandma Audrey’s parenting skills aren’t rinse, lather, repeat. With your dad, it was one favor after another. Nowadays, if anyone asks her for a favor, she fires back with, “Who was your slave last year?”

  To make a long story short: she never did you any favors. Well, maybe one, depending on how loosely you define favor. Washing one’s mouth out with soap doesn’t sound so bad, though washing makes it seem like it’s followed by being rinsed out, the way it happens at the dentist’s office, when your mouth is left feeling refreshed and minty. Grandma Audrey makes sure you swallow every last drop. Nothing went wasted in her house.

  Liquid Palmolive is tough on grease and soft on hands, but it also gives you the screaming shits for days on end.

  She pinches off your air, yanks your nose up toward the ceiling, slaps her other hand over your lips, tilts your head back so far you slide up onto your tippy-toes—you can’t fight this part, it’s simple mechanics. You can’t breathe, not that she cares, she is waiting for the reflex to kick in and your body to gulp down the dish detergent as if it was air. This is how drowning victims’ lungs fill with water. When you fight it, she says, “I’ll rip your nose right off your face.” To stop yourself from falling, you moonwalk. She tells you to stop fighting her, stop trying to get away, but you’re only trying to stop from falling over. God help you if you choke while gasping for a breath and spit any of it out onto the floor or onto her blouse. She slipped once, almost head-butting you, knocking her glasses off her face and down onto the floor. Luckily for her, she let go and clawed down your face and neck with her fingernails, breaking her fall. It’s as if she expects you to swallow it down like a teaspoon of bubblegum-flavored cough syrup. But even when it comes to that, she can make something so sweet so sour.

  For calling a girl a slut in the sixth grade, the punishment is two mouthfuls of soap. You’re a head taller by then, so she drags a chair out into the center of the kitchen floor and makes you sit. And this may sound like you came home from school and strolled out into the kitchen and took a seat after setting down your bookbag. But that’s not how this took place.

  She watches for you out the window and hauls you by the hair into the kitchen, bent at the waist yet simultaneously teetering on your tippy-toes every step of the way. You know not to fight her, though you could. Her kitchen is an armory full of wooden spoons, metal spatulas, metal fly swatters, metal-edged yardsticks, and a marble rolling pin—all of which she can, has, and will readily wield well outside the manufacturer’s intended purpose. History tells you teachers won’t or don’t ever ask what happened. They don’t even care at Sunday school.

  Swallowing mouthfuls of soap is not something the body wants to do, even if the mind says to go along with it and get it over with as quickly as possible—kind of like when you try to put in eye drops. These sorts of protests are automatic, like when you slam your mouth shut and snap your head from side to side when she brings the bottle to your lips—or any other time someone tries to force something inside of you. This is called a segue, one which leads back to that girl—the so-called slut. She had three abortions before she began high school. At twelve, she got knocked up by her big brother’s friend, and later, who knows who else. But she isn’t a slut. She was raped. She didn’t call it that, but that is what happens when a high schooler has sex with a girl in grade school.

  When Dad hears what you said to the girl, Debbie lets him know you’ve already been disciplined, that he doesn’t need to do anything, that she and Grandma already took care of it, that you got dish soap and screamed at and grounded for a week. But double jeopardy doesn’t exist in his eyes.

  He doesn’t holler out your name and wait for you to come downstairs so he can give you a talking to. Rather, he clomps up the flight of stairs, takes hold of your ankle, pulls you from the top bunk, and lets gravity do the rest. Before you can catch a breath, he grabs you by the neck and slams you against the wall until your hair sticks into the wood paneling and piss splashes on his boots.

  How dare you?

  He’s infuriated, so he slams you harder, telling you to “Stop pissing all over the damn place, sissy.” You do as you’re told. Instead, blood drips down the leg of your pants and onto his snakeskin boots as this latest concussion lulls you to sleep.

  The good thing about being beaten until you lose consciousness is how you don’t remember the grisly parts, the parts where you’ve stopped trying to protect yourself and instead give in to being tossed around like Debbie’s Raggedy Ann doll, the parts where your head and face and guts and nuts get kneaded like dough. This one is a memory that haunts your sister, not you, and that’s another segue.

  The first time you have sex, it’s in an abandoned barn. He’s holding you down. He’s twice your size, twice your age, too. Your face is buried in his chest. You can’t see, but you can smell. Maybe that’s why you remember this so viscerally?

  His musk mixes with the smell of spoiled, forgotten hay, cushioning your back from the floorboards of an abandoned barn’s hayloft. It quiets his grunts and groans and the guttural sounds you’ll never shake, the sounds that will never stop sending shivers across your skin. His sweat mats the hair on his chest, and that hair drags across your face, chest, shoulders. His sweat stings and sets your eyes on fire.

  You turn away, turn toward the door where the bales are hoisted up into the barn, toward the outside, toward the perfect blue cloudless sky.

  The afternoon sun becomes blinding, but not bright enough for the outside world to see what is happening. What is happening? You don’t possess the words to describe it. Not yet. Don’t talk. Stay quiet. Don’t get hurt. Get outside yourself. What is he doing? is a question that keeps swirling around in the back of your brain, draining down into whatever recesses days like this go to hide. How did he get you there? Somehow, that’s the part you’ve blocked out.

  When his weight lifts off you, your privates and belly are wet, warm, sticky, stinking. What he left behind pools in your belly button. He rises to his knees, leaving you covered in his sweat and shadow. He warns you he could flip you over and give you AIDS. You don’t know what it means. Only that it’s bad. So bad you remember hearing how Aunt Bobbie’s brother-in-law got it and jumped off the Bong Bridge to die less painlessly.

  Before you say one thing, he looks down and says, “See? You liked it,” and reminds you of how you could’ve stayed at Grandma Audrey’s cabin.

  But he actually invited you aw
ay from the cabin, away from Grandma. He rescued you from her for an afternoon. “Remember that,” he says.

  The two of you go for a swim as soon as you get back to the cabin—to wash off the mess. The evidence.

  You don’t tell Grandma.

  “If you do, none of the other big cousins will invite you to come with when they go for walks again. They’ll leave you there with Audrey,” he says, right before the two of you walk up the steps of the screened-in front porch.

  All of the cousins thought he was weird. He never wanted to play Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers or Army Men. Instead, he asked to play Charlie’s Angels, but he didn’t want to be Charlie, and the only girl at the cabin then was Debbie. But what makes any of that worth remembering? Who knows? Who cares? You work to forget him. He isn’t even a real cousin. He’s a removed cousin. Or a second cousin. He’s Dad’s cousin’s kid—whatever you call that. He isn’t two-spirit, either. He has no soul.

  It must have been the summer before the sixth grade, or maybe the fifth. It’s not like you can keep track of all the times he took you for walks. But by the end of the sixth grade, you find that giant dishtowel Grandma made to drape over the kitchen table waving in the wind on the clothesline. It’s still wet, so it takes some work, but eventually looks like a noose from Gunsmoke and the history specials on PBS when they punished bank robbers and Black folks who ran away.

  The neighbor lady paid somebody to trim the bottom boughs from her trees, so you have to take a lawn chair with you to get up there.

  The noose goes on like a backward necktie after the other end is knotted to a branch thick as your thigh. The lawn chair has to be kicked away. Even that doesn’t come easy for you, meaning: it scoots a time or two before it folds and falls away from your feet.