Two hours gone. I saw the bowl slipping from my hands, my faith shattered, cherries rolling across the floor. I saw the man more clearly than I had on the road, the impossible angles of his body, how he must have broken when he fell.
I heard my father say, Thou shalt not kill.
But this was not my crime. The Indian himself told me he accepted accidents, my drunkenness as well as his own. Then he whispered, But I don’t understand why you left me here alone.
I knew I should have gone with my father, to show him the way. I imagined him limping up and down that stretch of highway, waving his flashlight, calling out. On this road, wind had shape and leaves spoke. A bobcat’s eyes flashed. A coyote crossed the road. I felt how tired my father must be, that old pain throbbing deep in the bone.
I tried not to count all the minutes till dawn. I tried to live in this minute alone. I wanted to speak to the man, to tell him he had to live like me, like this, one minute to the next. I knew the night was too long to imagine while his blood was spilling out. I promised, He’ll come. I said, Just stay with your body that long. There’s a hospital down the road where they have bags of blood to hang above your bed, blood to flow through tubes and needles into your veins — enough blood to fill your body again and again.
I went to the bathroom, turned on the heater. I needed this, the smallest room, the closed door. I crushed the beads of lilac soap till I was sick with the smell. I heard the last crickets and the first birds, and I thought, No, not yet. I heard the man say, I’m still breathing but not for long. He told me, Once I sold three pints of blood in two days. He said, I could use some of that back now.
Then there were edges of light at the window and the phone was ringing. Jean’s mother, I thought. I saw my friend naked, passed out in the dirt or drowned in the pond. This too my fault.
The phone again. The police at last.
I must have closed my eyes, relieved, imagining questions and handcuffs, a fast car, a safe cell. Soon, so soon, I wouldn’t be alone.
I must have dreamed.
The phone kept ringing.
This time I picked it up.
It was the Indian boy. He said, I’ll slit your throat.
Past noon before my father got home. I understood exactly what he’d done as soon as I saw the truck: the fender was undented, the headlight magically whole. I knew he must have gone all the way to Missoula, to a garage where men with greasy fingers asked no questions, where a man’s cash could buy a girl’s freedom.
I couldn’t believe this was his choice. Couldn’t believe that this small thing, the mockery of metal and glass, my crime erased, was the only miracle he could trust.
He said, Did you sleep? I shook my head. He said, Well, you should.
I thought, How can he speak to me this way if he knows what I’ve done? Then I thought, We, not I — it’s both of us now.
The phone once more. I picked it up before he could say Stop. The police, I hoped. They’ll save me since my father won’t. But it was Jean. Thanks a lot, she said. I’m grounded for a month.
Then she hung up.
Vincent Blew was long dead when he was found. The headline said, UNIDENTIFIED MAN VICTIM OF HIT AND RUN. One paragraph. Enough words to reveal how insignificant his life was. Enough words to lay the proper blame: “elevated blood alcohol level indicates native man was highly intoxicated.”
I thought, Yes, we will each answer for our own deaths.
Then there were these words, meant to comfort the killer, I suppose: “Injuries suggest he died on impact.”
I knew what people would think, reading this. Just one Indian killing another on a reservation road. Let the tribal police figure it out.
Still, the newspaper gave me a kind of hope. I found it folded on the kitchen table, beside my father’s empty mug. I thought, He believed my lie about the deer until today. He is that good. He fixed the truck so the doctor wouldn’t see. He was ashamed of my drunkenness, that’s all.
I was calm.
When he comes home, we’ll sit at this table. He’ll ask nothing. Father of infinite patience. He’ll wait for me to tell it all. When I stop speaking, we’ll drive to town. He’ll stay beside me. But he won’t hang on.
I was so grateful I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling down.
I thought, He loves me this much, to listen, to go with me, to give me up.
All these years I’d been wrong about the hunter. Now I saw the father’s grief, how he suffered with his wounds, how his passion surpassed the dead son’s. I saw the boy’s deception, that deer-colored coat. I understood it was the child’s silent stupidity that made the father turn the gun on himself.
I meant to say this as well.
But my father stayed in the orchard all day. At four, I put on dark glasses and went to the doctor’s house. I polished gold faucets and the copper bottoms of pots; I got down on my hands and knees to scrub each tile of the bathroom floor. The doctor’s wife stood in the doorway, watching me from behind.
She said, That’s nice, Ada.
She said, Don’t forget the tub.
When I came back to the cottage, I saw the paper stuffed in the trash, the mug washed. My father asked what I wanted for dinner, and I told him I was going to town. He said I could use the truck, and I said, I know.
I meant I knew there was nothing he’d refuse.
He saw me held tight in the dead Indian’s arms. He was afraid of me, the truth I could tell.
Sometimes when I dream, the night I met Vincent Blew is just a movie I’m watching. Every body is huge. Yellow Dog’s brilliant face fills the screen. He grins. He hangs on to that torch too long. I try to close my eyes, but the lids won’t come down. His body bursts, shards of light; his body tears the sky apart. Then everything’s on fire: pond, grass, hair — boy’s breath, red shirt.
But later he’s alive. He’s an angel rising above me. He’s Vincent Blew hovering over the road. The truck passes through him, no resistance, no jolt — no girl with black eyes, no body in the grass, no bloody nose. There’s a whisper instead, a ragged voice full of static coming up from the ground. It’s Vincent murmuring just to me: You’re drunk, little girl. Close your eyes. I’ll steer. I’ll get us home.
And these nights, when he takes the wheel, when he saves us, these nights are the worst of all.
Three days before the man was known. His cousin claimed him. She said she danced with him the night he died. In Ronan, at the Wild Horse Bar. Then he was Vincent Blew, and she was Simone Falling Bear. It amazed me to think of it, the dead man dancing, the dead man in another woman’s arms.
She said he died just a mile from her house. I knew then that her cousin Vincent was her lover too, that her house was a tarpaper shack at the end of a dirt road, that her refrigerator was a box of ice, her heater a woodstove. She’d have a bag of potatoes in a pail under the sink, a stack of cans with no labels on the shelf.
I saw that even in his stupor Vincent Blew knew the way home.
She said he’d been an altar boy, that he knew the words of the Latin mass by heart. She said he’d saved two men at la Drang and maybe more. She had his Medal of Honor as proof. She said he wanted to open a school on the reservation where the children would learn to speak in their own tongue.
But that was before the war, before he started to drink so much.
He had these dreams. He had a Purple Heart. Look at his chest. They had to staple his bones shut.