The Night Watchman(56)
He was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making.
Thomas looked at the big childish man with his vigorous corn-yellow cowlicks and watery blue eyes. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for a white fellow. There was something about some of them—their sudden thought that to become an Indian might help. Help with what? Thomas wanted to be generous. But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.
“No,” he said gently, “you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.”
Barnes’s shoulders slumped, but what Thomas said was a comfort to him. They could like him anyway. He’d be acknowledged, liked, and that was important because he didn’t have his heart set on any other woman in this world but Pixie. Oh, it was Pixie and Pixie alone. He had to fight every day to convince himself that she might, somehow, against the ever more perfect image of Wood Mountain, turn her sumptuous melting gaze upon him and reward him with the sort of smile he’d never seen turned his way, but had witnessed, once, when she’d laughed at and appreciated something Pokey had done.
“Appreciate me with your eyes,” he thought as he drove home, her image bobbing up in the darkness. “Oh Pixie, only once, just appreciate me with your eyes.”
The glowing lights and even the numbers on the dashboard cast a lonely glare. The equation of love balanced and rebalanced in his thoughts like a playground seesaw. Could he load his side with better attributes? Modest changes to his wardrobe? A subtle swirl in his hair to hide thin areas? And gifts. What woman doesn’t like a gift? Well, maybe Patrice. A gift might prick her suspicions. But how about a gift to her younger brother, Pokey? Evidence of Barnes’s generosity, but no strings attached. What would be wrong with that?
Twin Dreams
Women’s bodies make such miracles. After a week of intense suckling by the baby, there was a trickle of milk. Patrice had believed her mother, but she was still surprised. Zhaanat told her with some assurance that in starving times a man had even been known to give milk, and insisted that by the change of the moon she would have a normal amount.
“Just until Vera’s back,” she said.
Every night now, as it grew colder, Patrice worked on the house. She remudded the spaces between the logs with clay dug up near the slough, and closed the tiny gaps between the window frames with dried grass. With her waterjack money she had bought boxes of plaster, whitewash, rolls of tar paper, nails, a hammer. She fixed the tar paper to the frame of the roof. She used a heavy mixture of mud and grass to close the eaves. After school and boxing, Pokey came home and helped her spread plaster on the inside of the walls. In the corner where he slept, they used rabbit glue to paste photographs and stories to the wall. Rocky Graziano, Tony Zale, Jersey Joe Walcott, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Archie Moore stared out, over their round gloves, in the soft dusk. These photos and stories were not from the magazines that Valentine passed on to Patrice, but from boxing magazines that Barnes gave Pokey, first a stack and then another and another. Although Barnes implied he’d read these magazines, the covers and pages were stiff and new. Also, he gave Pokey a winter jacket. Not an old hand-me-down coat either, but a brand-new red and black checked winter jacket that reminded Patrice, uncomfortably, of the lumberjack theme at Log Jam 26. The jacket had knitted cuffs, a thick snap-on pile collar. Barnes claimed that someone had given him this jacket and he was just finding the jacket a good home. It was obvious to Patrice that Barnes had bought it, which got her goat. As if she couldn’t have bought her own brother a jacket? As if she wouldn’t have done it if Pokey’s old coat was worn out? Which it wasn’t. Also she could have bought him the hat, brown wool with a bill and fold-down earflaps.
“Barnes give that to you?”
“Yes.”
Pokey beamed and stroked the front of the coat. He brushed the pile collar with his fingers.
“Oh, it’s real nice,” said Patrice, but in a way that made Pokey look at her closely.
“Should I give it back?”
“No,” said Patrice.
After all, how could she spoil her brother’s pride? But also, once kids found out where his nice things came from, they would give him a hard time.
“Pokey, don’t brag Barnes gave you presents, okay?”
“I wouldn’t even!”
“And don’t take anything else he gives you, okay?”
“Okay,” said Pokey.
He looked over at his boots. They were brand-new handsome leather boots with black-and-white marled laces. He thought Patrice might say something, but she was slapping the glue on Zale, using a stick, giving the Man of Steel the beating of his life.
Before sunrise, Vera always came back. As Patrice was floating out of her sleep, her sister would appear. Not as Vera had been when she left for the Cities, wearing high-heeled shoes, stockings, carrying a rose-pink cardboard suitcase. Not with her eyes all lighted up. Not grinning skeptically at something Patrice said, not pausing to gather her laugh. No, that was not the Vera who visited. One morning, Patrice was back in the alley where Jack had probably died. Again, Patrice stopped at the pile of clothing in the wet alley. Again, she pulled away the collar of a jacket. Only instead of Jack’s skeleton smile it was Vera’s twisted gaping face and blood-choked mouth. Another morning she stood in the dust of a room empty but for a chair and a slashed leather collar, a stained and crumpled sheet. There were footsteps and Patrice whirled around. Somebody was in the room, there was scratching in the walls, and Vera said her name.