eclipsing clouds, cutting into your eyes like spears reflecting unforgivable bleak bright sun, skull deserts, salt basins, rocks layered the yellow of autumn leaves and maroon clay. The engine rumbled us along edges of highway. In Los Angeles, I baked brown on the beach and it did not matter. Once in a while, on the sand, a group of Mexicans would wander by and, with a mixture of relief and shame, I heard and recognized the different cadence of their Spanish words, flirted casually with the dark girls, all the while knowing nothing would ever come of it. Because I was meant, I told myself, for finer things. Whiter things.
With my buddies and our rattling car, beer cans and aspirin and a dwindling amount of cash we traveled back a different way, up along creek beds and piney ridges and shadowed black hills. A land so extraordinary that I promised myself to return one day, and show it to my children.
Which I did. A man of my word. Jack was an infant, Babe six. It was the year she started swimming. I had money by then—it was just starting to swell a savings account—and my beautiful fair American wife, and I had a nice car. We drove into state parks, past bubbling springs and bear cubs, herds of elk, rainbow-colored canyons, through windstorms and summer rain. Emerging into hot sunlight again at a place called the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota—an auditorium boasting glass display cases filled with information about the winning of the West, its exterior a gaudy architectural extravaganza of gold-tinted domes and spires. Nearby were situated many shops selling postcards and sunglasses and trinkets for tourists, along a wood-railed boardwalk constructed to resemble that of a nineteenth-century frontier town.
Barbara and the kids wandered off into some shop. I was tired, and sat on a bench. I leaned back. The sunlight felt good on my closed eyelids. Maybe I dozed briefly, I don’t remember. But something made me open my eyes to the shadow-less boardwalk, the hot white air, sound of a child giggling, then another. I began to make out shapes of blond white children in the light, fat parents holding their hands, the figure of a small boy pointing at me, giggling: He looks like Uncle Zeke! A fatherly voice mumbled something back, a hushed drawl. The tiny white finger kept pointing, though—at me, at something to the right of me. So I turned that way.
What sat beside me on the bench seemed, at first, to be human. The skin was a tawny dark leather, the hair long and swept back from the forehead and broad hawkish nose by a full eagle-feathered headdress. The hands in the lap were lifelike, turned up in a kind of supplication. There was a buckskin jacket, worn tanned buckskin moccasins. On second glance, though, it was a thing with no life in it at all—nothing but a stuffed, man-sized doll. A red-lettered placard hung around its neck, settled against the leathery buckskin chest.
TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH UNCLE ZEKE.
Somewhere, a camera flashed.
There were more children now, more parents. The sun was bright, my eyes tired. I could hardly make them out. Someone laughed. The laughter swelled in my ears, sun in my eyes, until for a second I thought I was enveloped in an indistinguishable, suffocating white mass of flesh, and sweat, and pointing fingers.
He does, came the boy’s voice. He looks just like him.
Then I did something I will never understand.
I smiled back at the big indistinguishable mass of white things blinding me, and turned back to Uncle Zeke. His form was clear, his features noble. In that moment, I wished him alive. And put my arm around him. Then kissed his leather cheek.
There was more laughter now, the deep chuckling of adults mingled with the patter of children’s voices. More cameras sounded, clicking, flashing miniature popping explosions. I looked back at them without seeing them, lifted a hand to my face and dropped it in surprise. For some reason, I don’t know why, there were tears in my
With my buddies and our rattling car, beer cans and aspirin and a dwindling amount of cash we traveled back a different way, up along creek beds and piney ridges and shadowed black hills. A land so extraordinary that I promised myself to return one day, and show it to my children.
Which I did. A man of my word. Jack was an infant, Babe six. It was the year she started swimming. I had money by then—it was just starting to swell a savings account—and my beautiful fair American wife, and I had a nice car. We drove into state parks, past bubbling springs and bear cubs, herds of elk, rainbow-colored canyons, through windstorms and summer rain. Emerging into hot sunlight again at a place called the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota—an auditorium boasting glass display cases filled with information about the winning of the West, its exterior a gaudy architectural extravaganza of gold-tinted domes and spires. Nearby were situated many shops selling postcards and sunglasses and trinkets for tourists, along a wood-railed boardwalk constructed to resemble that of a nineteenth-century frontier town.
Barbara and the kids wandered off into some shop. I was tired, and sat on a bench. I leaned back. The sunlight felt good on my closed eyelids. Maybe I dozed briefly, I don’t remember. But something made me open my eyes to the shadow-less boardwalk, the hot white air, sound of a child giggling, then another. I began to make out shapes of blond white children in the light, fat parents holding their hands, the figure of a small boy pointing at me, giggling: He looks like Uncle Zeke! A fatherly voice mumbled something back, a hushed drawl. The tiny white finger kept pointing, though—at me, at something to the right of me. So I turned that way.
What sat beside me on the bench seemed, at first, to be human. The skin was a tawny dark leather, the hair long and swept back from the forehead and broad hawkish nose by a full eagle-feathered headdress. The hands in the lap were lifelike, turned up in a kind of supplication. There was a buckskin jacket, worn tanned buckskin moccasins. On second glance, though, it was a thing with no life in it at all—nothing but a stuffed, man-sized doll. A red-lettered placard hung around its neck, settled against the leathery buckskin chest.
TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH UNCLE ZEKE.
Somewhere, a camera flashed.
There were more children now, more parents. The sun was bright, my eyes tired. I could hardly make them out. Someone laughed. The laughter swelled in my ears, sun in my eyes, until for a second I thought I was enveloped in an indistinguishable, suffocating white mass of flesh, and sweat, and pointing fingers.
He does, came the boy’s voice. He looks just like him.
Then I did something I will never understand.
I smiled back at the big indistinguishable mass of white things blinding me, and turned back to Uncle Zeke. His form was clear, his features noble. In that moment, I wished him alive. And put my arm around him. Then kissed his leather cheek.
There was more laughter now, the deep chuckling of adults mingled with the patter of children’s voices. More cameras sounded, clicking, flashing miniature popping explosions. I looked back at them without seeing them, lifted a hand to my face and dropped it in surprise. For some reason, I don’t know why, there were tears in my
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