The hills are hungry, and I don’t doubt they’d kill every horse in the stable. Until nothing’s left but the red of their eyes in the snow.
When the crisis ends my father goes into town to drink. Oral and Henry go along. I wake at about four in the morning to the sound of our motorcar pulling up the road, and Oral and Henry propping father under his arms and bringing him in the house down below me. He moans in the living room. Oral and Henry laugh about a girl they met in a speakeasy. I don’t get back to sleep until around dawn, when Oral comes into my room and tells me to get started in the stables.
26
I’M FIFTEEN. IN THE mornings I lurch into the kitchen, with the middle of me that carries its memories of dreamwomen as hard as steel and big as a president’s monument. The family literally turns away from the sight in shock. Alice has some sort of palpitations by the counter with the flour canisters, and my brothers seethe in fury. Only my father stares with perplexity, his mouth dropping slightly and forgetting to chew. This is, for the rest of them, the most terrifying manifestation of my size yet. It’s almost more than they can live with in the same house, I think.
27
THINGS I WRITE NOW are also more than Alice can abide: she finds them in my bedroom. For someone in a state of nearly paralyzed mortification she manages to read every word. She takes the matter up with my father. They have a family council of sorts, my father and Alice and my two brothers. They analyze the situation. They speculate as to my psychology and morality and stability. The brothers lobby hard for an institutional solution, but my father settles for a whipping out in the barn and leaving me to sleep with the horses. “Try not to have intimate relations with any of them while you’re out here,” he says when he’s done. His anger seems more personal than the others. “You’re one to talk,” I have the nerve to answer back, and he beats me some more.
It’s 1933. A faultline runs through the epoch. Over here we’ve got Roosevelt, over there they’ve got this guy in Berlin. They’ve got this guy in Russia.
I’m sixteen. The things I see from the windows of my bedroom make less and less sense. Soon a new moment will come with a faultline of its own, and I’ll step to the other side. And on that side it’ll be a long time — perhaps not until the moment I die at the feet of an old woman in a little town on an island I cannot name — before I see anything so clearly again.
It’s you I mean, of course, and it began that afternoon in Vienna when you were still a young girl. And no dreamwoman I ever woke to, before or after, touched you. Nor did I, though it changed everything just to see you, no less than did the small German with wild white hair who wiped the clock clean of numbers altogether.
But that’s later. This is tonight, in 1933, on my father’s ranch. Or rather its outskirts, where the Indians live. And tonight is the night.
28
HENRY COMES INTO MY room and wakes me up. It’s about eleven o’clock. The moon is whole and though I’ve pulled the curtains across all nine of my windows the moon’s bright enough that they’re like nine white patches on the walls. When I awake Henry’s got his face about two inches from mine. “Hey soldier,” he says. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s the middle of the night. “You awake?” he says. “How’s the machine?” I sit up in the dark rubbing my face, still groggy. “What machine?” I say, and he says, “You know, the old monster.”
“What’s going on?” I say.
“How old are you Banning?” he says. He knows how old I am, or at least he has a general idea. I sit listening a moment, the rest of the house is quiet. Henry’s being very friendly. His voice is big brotherly.
“What’s going on,” I say again.
“A lady, Banning,” Henry answers, “a lady for Banning tonight.” He pulls the blanket off the bed and throws me my pants off the dresser. “Come on.”
I’m suspicious of his big brotherliness, and I’m also seduced by it. I’ve wanted it for a long time, longer than I’ve wanted to know a woman, though I’ve been wanting that pretty strongly for the last year or two. “Where are we going?” I say to him.
“We’re going to see a lady friend, don’t you want to see a lady friend? See if that machine fits in something besides your hand. You’re going to be popular, little brother.”
“But who is it?”
“Are you going to get dressed?” Slowly I start pulling on my pants, there in the dark of the bedroom, nine white patches swimming around me. “She’s a friend of Oral’s and mine. Father’s, too. Sort of the Jainlight men’s all-around friend.”
“But why? Why’s she a friend?”
Henry pauses and says, “We pay her to be a friend. I’ve got the money right here in my pocket. You’ll see.” I don’t doubt he stole it from Alice like he always does. “Here’s your shirt,” he says, pulling one out of the drawer, and then he leaves the room. I grab my shoes and follow him, not entirely sure about any of it, but unwilling to let escape the prospect of manhood and brotherhood all in the same night. He’s at the bottom of the stairs when I’m at the top. He looks up and puts his finger to his lips. A dim light comes from the living room. Holding my shoes I move down the stairs barefooted. In a chair in the living room Alice sleeps with a comforter pulled up around her chin. The tight little curls around her head begin to droop across her brow. Henry approaches her, standing over her, then looks over his shoulder at me and gestures to the back of the house. I move through the kitchen as quickly as possible. I bang into the table and knock a pan from the stove, catching it in midair.
Oral’s waiting outside the back door. His hands are shoved deep in his pockets, but actually it’s a warm night. Henry comes out the back door behind me and nods at Oral, and Oral without saying a word signals us to follow him. We head off with the valley before us bleached blue from the full moon, and the fences of the ranch jag across our view like white stitches on a wound. We make our way past the barn and the stables and I can hear the horses rustle and speak to the sound of our feet. None of us says anything until I say, once we’re past the stables, “Where are we going?” and then we’re quiet again since neither of them answers me. Finally I say something like, “She does it for money?” and then Oral says, “Will you keep quiet?” and Henry says, “That’s it, Banning, she does it for money. Like I said.” Then we go on some more until we’re to the outskirts of the ranch.
This is where the Indians live. There’s not much left of them at this point, one family that’s made up of a mother and father and two small kids and a grandfather, living in a single hut; and in another hut an old woman whose man used to work on the ranch before he died; and in the third hut Gayla, the halfbreed kitchen help. It’s Gayla’s hut we go to, in the dark. We’re all looking around over our shoulders, though I’m not certain what it is we’re looking for. The moon splashes on the trees like milk. I don’t know what to make of it that Oral takes a screwdriver from his pocket and snaps off the lock on Gayla’s door. It takes about as much force as opening a bottle. The two of them burst into the hut and I hear some muffled sound from inside. “Will you get in here,” I hear Henry saying to me, and I go in.
There’s not much to see in the hut. The moon lights it up clearly and I can see the Indian woman on a bed in the corner. She’s holding her arm across her eyes, maybe from the light, but maybe from something else she doesn’t want to see, I don’t know. “Close the door,” Oral says, and then he says it again. I close it a little ways, but leave it open enough so I can see her. Oral’s got her by the arms and Henry’s saying to me, “All right, soldier, all right,” and he keeps gesturing for me to come closer. I stand where I am. “You can tear her clothes off if you want,” I hear Henry say. Gayla cries out. The other Indians in the other huts must hear all this, but no one’s running over to see what’s going on. It’s easy to picture them huddling in their beds waiting for the whole thing to be done. When I don’t move from where I stand, Henry tears her clothes off.