to see their mother take another beating. Afraid to take another beating themselves. Afraid of the temporary quiet that in a moment can explode in another unpredictable scene of Father’s hysterical, blind, hallucinating, medicated panic. Afraid of the catatonia that fills the low ceiling of the trailer like a storm cloud. They creep around, watching Father as he sits on the edge of his bed in the dark, far end of the tunnel, saying nothing, hearing nothing, responding to nothing.
The trailer stinks of terror when Father begins his sixteen-hour confession, filled with the struggling revelations of his broken soul. He tortures his wife with his self-deprecations. Why is she so afraid? Because she knows that in any instant she will see the flip side of her husband’s illness. The deprecations will become accusations, the confessions will become denials, the denials will become rationalizations. His rumbling voice will storm in the close confines of the metal tube, and threats and weird plots will hiss into his wife’s face. Father will change from a pliant and hopeful invalid into a monster of cold, hard, hopeless cruelty. Father will make the dependents suffer. Then the military man will make the wife and children feel a little bit of the fear and pain and rage that is at the heart of his regimented insane world. They’ll learn well — because he’ll teach them.
The wife will take her turn, in her own desperate need. You’ll see her in a scarf, hiding the lumpy cheeks and jawline. Almost glamorous in her sunglasses hiding her bloody eyes. She goes to the hospital to arrange an appointment with the base doctor, the highest in command. She tells him she can’t take any more, and asks if they can please take her husband back on the ward. Sometimes they do. But usually the request has to come from her husband or his superior officer, because this is an important decision, a man’s decision.
Sometimes the husband discovers the wife’s visit and then the wife is hospitalized for a couple of days. The children remain buried under sheets in their bunks, forcing themselves to sleep with high temperatures, unable to set their feet on their father’s linoleum floor. They dream of dinosaurs mating in blood and mud under black skies as their drunken father careens against the thin trailer walls muttering, “What did I do — oh baby — what did I do to you? I’m sorry — I’m so sorry. You BITCH! You CASTRATING whore.”
Normally the doctor just feigns a sympathetic voice and tells the wife the old story. How her husband is in bad shape from the war, and that she just can’t understand what he has been through. How much he needs her support, and that he’ll be better when he gets back his confidence in himself and the world again. The doctor might even read her husband’s war record, and he embellishes it a little. The confused wife wants to believe that her husband is a war hero, that somehow all this slaughter is not in vain. She makes an effort to believe the lie that his sacrifice somehow belittles her own. She starts feeling proud of her man, and guilty about complaining after all he’s been through.
Slowly she reaches for her handbag, as she begins to see the image of the young man she married. She walks down the steps of the hospital, adjusts her scarf and sunglasses, and fights bravely the flow of her tears.
She returns home, chilled to the bone in her cold nervous sweat, seeing an old photograph of her husband before her eyes — the farmboy from Lawrence, Kansas, with the funny grin, the 4H president from Tacoma, or the football hero from Amarillo. She’ll decide to face another day, and another night. Besides, where could she go with all those kids?
Epitaph
She walks onto the trailer stair and grabs the cold metal handle. Her breath gasps in her throat as she steps into the dark, into the tomb, into the stench of Jim Beam and beer. She hears a voice like the growl of a dog, somewhere in the darkest corner: “Where the fuck have you been?”
NAVAJO
I had the front seat to myself, windows down, hot air exploding in loud gusts propelling little tornados of paper and dirt around me. The landscape was hot as hell and repeated itself over and over and over.
She was sleeping — taking the back seat on one hip, jet-black hair blasting in the wind, swirling around her head, all over her face. She was so tired she couldn’t feel a thing. With her Navajo eyes closed, she looked Japanese, beautiful as all get out.
The car I was driving was exactly the kind I had always hoped to drive — a real gas-guzzler, with a broken headlight, oversize tires in the rear, and a mass of tangled wires hanging under the dashboard, rumbling along the absolutely abandoned highway. Nothing worked except the gas gauge, and it read empty.
Her dog was thirsty. I twisted over the back seat and felt around with my free hand until I was scratching behind the dog’s long, pointed ear. We approached a Texaco station with a faded Pegasus heading forty-five degrees skyward on a round tin shield.
The car growled as I downshifted. The gravel from the roadside rose in a dusty cloud. I drove past the station, slowed down to around sixty and spun a bootlegger turn back into my own dust cloud, filling the windows with brown grit. The girl rocked against the back seat, still sound asleep. The dog tried to get his footing and thumped into the front seat twice. I idled the car into the station’s garage and parked it in the empty shade. The dust cloud blew slowly down the road outside. I sat there in the dark, adjusting my eyes and feeling the cool air, thinking of the sun, blinding hot outside of the tin shack, and my wife.
I opened the car door and kissed the air loudly a couple of times until the dizzy dog pressed unsteady front paws on the greasy concrete. The dog followed me around until I found a bucket and filled it with water. The dog drank in sloppy loud slaps.
I went around the corner of the shack and took a long piss. The car door latch opened and slammed shut. Her voice was cooing to her dog. I began to make out her words. “Where’d he go? Huh? Where’d he go?”
I shook off the last drops and buttoned my pants. She wound around the corner, pulling her waist-length black hair off the side of her face. She rubbed one eye with a small silver-ringed fist, breathed in and out deeply, put her hands in the back of her jeans and settled her weight on one leg, getting her balance in her rough-out boots.
“Where are we?” she demanded with a smile.
I shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Good. The less you know the better.”
“That’s what they tell me.” Her teeth gleamed behind dry lips.
We stood awhile looking out across four hundred miles of glaring desert, ending in heat-wave-rippling, reddish mountains.
“We’re lost, then,” she finally muttered. I knew that was a way of referring to how we felt about each other. I knew not to respond. A minute or two passed.
“Almost lost. We’re heading south. We’ll cross a main road before too long. We can be in those hills tonight, or in some beach parking lot by tomorrow morning.” My words sounded like a speech and I felt embarrassed. I hoped she wouldn’t put me down.
She nodded and said, “Let’s go to the beach.”
She picked up a stone and dented a fresh beer can lying about forty yards away. I didn’t move. She did it again, same beer can. I wiped my nose and covered my smile, in a self-conscious movie-cowboy kind of way.
She leaned under my face and looked up into my eyes, saying in a mocking tone, “I’m magic.”
I told her I knew that already, with the same tone I would use later to ask the ancient man behind the motel office desk if he had a room.
She tossed a stick and the dog chased
