I don’t know what lies the reporter told to make Simone Falling Bear talk. Perhaps he said, We want people to understand your loss.
That reporter found Vincent’s wife in Yakima, living with another man. He asked her about Vietnam, and she said she never saw any medals. She said Vincent’s school was just some crazy talk, and that boy was drinking beer from his mama’s bottle when he was three years old. When the reporter asked if Vincent Blew was ever a Catholic, she laughed. She said, Everybody was.
In a dream I climb a hill to find Vincent’s mother. She lives in a cave, behind rocks. I have to move a stone to get her out. She points to three sticks stuck in the dirt. She says, This is my daughter; these are my sons.
September, and Vincent Blew was two months dead. I was supposed to go to school, ride the bus, drink milk. But I couldn’t be with those children. Couldn’t raise my hand or sit in the cafeteria and eat my lunch. I went to the lake instead, swam in the cold water till my chest hurt and my arms went numb. Fallen trees lay just below the surface; rocks lay deeper still. I knew what they were. I wasn’t afraid. Only my own shadow moved.
I came home at the usual time to make dinner for my father. Fried chicken, green beans. I remember snapping each one. He didn’t ask, How was school? I thought he knew, again, and didn’t want to know, didn’t want to risk the question, any question — my weeping, the truth sputtered out at last, those words so close: Daddy, I can’t.
The next day I lay on the beach for hours. I burned. My clothes hurt my skin. I thought, He’ll see this.
But again we ate our dinner in silence, only the clink of silverware, the strain of swallowing, his muttered Thank you when I cleared his plate. He sat on the porch while I washed the dishes, didn’t come back inside till he heard the safe click, my bedroom door closed.
I saw how it was between us now. He hated each sound: the match striking, my breath sucked back, the weight of me on the floor. He knew exactly where I was — every moment — by the creak of loose boards. I learned how words stung, even the most harmless ones: Rice tonight, or potatoes? He had to look away to answer. Rice, please.
His childhood wounds, his sister’s death — those sorrows couldn’t touch his faith. My mother, with all her lies, couldn’t break him. Only his daughter could do that. I was the occasion of sin. I was the road and the truck he was driving. He couldn’t turn back.
The third day, he said, They called from school.
I nodded. I’ll go, I said.
He nodded too, and that was the end of it.
But I didn’t go. I hitched to Kalispell, went to six restaurants, finally found a job at a truck stop west of town.
That night I told my father I needed the truck to get to work, eleven to seven, graveyard.
I knew he wouldn’t speak enough words to argue.
I married the first trucker who asked. I was eighteen. It didn’t last. He had a wife in Ellensburg already, five kids. After that I rented a room in Kalispell, a safe place with high, tiny windows. Even the most careless girl couldn’t fall.
Then it was March, the year I was twenty, and my father had his first heart attack. I quit my job and tried to go home. I thought he’d let me take care of him, that I could bear the silence between us.
Three weeks I slept in my father’s house, my old room, the little bed.
One morning I slept too long. Light filled the window, flooded across the floor. It terrified me, how bright it was.
I felt my father gone.
In his room, I saw the bed neatly made, covers pulled tight, corners tucked.
I found him outside the doctor’s house. He had his gun in one hand, the hose in the other. He’d flushed three rats from under the porch and shot them all.
He meant he could take care of himself.
He meant he wanted me to go.
I got a day job, south of Ronan this time, the Morning After Café. Seventeen years I’ve stayed. I live in a trailer not so many miles from the dirt road that leads to Simone Falling Bear’s shack.
Sometimes I see her in the bars — Buffalo Bill’s, Wild Horse, Lucy’s Chance. She recognizes me, a regular, like herself. She tips her beer, masking her face in a flash of green glass.
When she stares, I think, She sees me for who I really am. But then I realize she’s staring at the air, a place between us, and I think, Yes, if we both stare at the same place at the same time, we’ll see him there. But she looks at the bottle again, her loose change on the bar, her own two hands.
Tonight I didn’t see Simone. Tonight I danced. Once I was a pretty girl. Like Noelle, shining in her pale skin. It’s not vain to say I was like that. I’m thirty-seven now, already old. Some women go to loose flesh, some to hard bone. I’m all edges from years living on whiskey and smoke.
But I can still fool men in these dim bars. I can fix myself up, curl my hair, paint my mouth. I have a beautiful blue dress, a bra with wires in the cups. I dance all night. I spin like Noelle; I shine, all sweat and blush and will.
Hours later, in my trailer, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. The stranger I’m with doesn’t care how I look: he only wants me to keep moving in the dark.
Drifters, liars — men who don’t ask questions, men with tattoos and scars, men just busted out, men on parole; men with guns in their pockets, secrets of their own; men who can’t love me, who don’t pretend, who never want to stay too long: these men leave spaces, nights between that Vincent fills. He opens me. I’m the ground. Dirt and stone. He digs at me with both hands. He wants to lie down.
Or it’s the other way around. It’s winter. It’s cold. I’m alone in the woods with my father’s gun. I’ll freeze. I’ll starve. I look for rabbits, pray for deer. I try to cut a hole in the frozen earth, but it’s too hard.
It’s a bear I have to kill, a body I have to open if I want to stay warm. I have to live in him forever, hidden in his fur, down deep in the smell of bear stomach and bear heart. We lumber through the woods like this. I’ve lost my human voice. Nobody but the bear understands me now.
Last week my lover was a white man with black stripes tattooed across his back. His left arm was withered. Useless, he told me. Shrapnel, Dak To.
He was a small man, thin, but heavier than you’d expect.
He had a smooth stone in his pocket, three dollars in his hatband, the queen of spades in his boot. He said, She brings me luck.
He showed me the jagged purple scar above one kidney, told the story of a knife that couldn’t kill.
The week before, my lover was bald and pale, his fingers thick. He spoke Latin in his sleep; he touched my mouth.
It’s always like this. It’s always Vincent coming to me through them.
This bald one said he loaded wounded men into helicopters, medevacs in Song Be and Dalat. Sometimes he rode with them. One time all of them were dead.
He was inside me when he told me that.
He robbed a convenience store in Seattle, a liquor store in Spokane. He did time in Walla Walla. I heard his switchblade spring and click. Felt it at my throat before I saw it flash.
He said, They say I killed a man.
He said, But I saved more than that.
He had two daughters, a wife somewhere. They didn’t want him back.
The cool knife still pressed my neck. He said, I’m innocent.
I have nothing to lose. Nothing precious for a lover to steal — no ruby earrings, no silver candlesticks.
In my refrigerator he’ll find Tabasco sauce and mayonnaise, six eggs, a dozen beers.