Mick’s motorcycle is in the barn. Exactly where he left it, up on blocks, though the canvas tarp looks suspiciously new. I wonder how many of those my father has replaced, laid over the bike and pinned down with the same water-smoothed, calf-skull-size stones my brother chose so carefully and hauled back from the river in 1966. The wheels still hang on the walls, the tires completely dried out, brittle as shed snakeskin.
I remember enough about motors to get it started, take the wheels to town for new rubber. Mick taught me to ride a long time ago, so long now that I stall her once or twice before we are out on the road, and then it is all I can do not to twist the throttle full on and just wait for the road to turn. But I know I have to baby her, or she’ll die, and my brother’s reincarnation, in whatever form, will have my ass if that happens.
When I get back after the first ride, I see that my mother has fastened a helmet to the porch rail. I undo its strap, hold it up to inspect it, thinking for a second it might be my old one, but then remember mine was red, and smaller. This one is black, with an American flag decal, upside down, on the back. Clearly Mick’s. I am not putting it on my head. I will get a new one. I forgot I had promised him to never ride without one.
I had also promised to never drink more than I could handle, not to do drugs other than smoke pot, never sleep with anyone I didn’t at least think I was in love with. Since I was too young at the time to even be able to imagine doing any of those things, it was easy to say yes. I promise. Swear on the moon. The helmet, at least, I can do something about.
Every night after my parents have gone to bed, I get a beer and go outside, stretch out on my back in the prickly grass, and wait for full dark. It takes a long time, but it is worth it. Even with the new houses, there is almost no ambient light here, and I can clearly distinguish so many individual stars it makes my head spin. The Milky Way appears painted on. It is as sharp, as delineated, as the stripe on a skunk. It is harder to pick out the constellations, with so many minor players swarming the stage. But I do at least still remember where to look for a lot of them, as I had two authorities to teach me: first Mick and then Darrell. Between the two of them, I got several versions each of the same arrangements. My eyes stray habitually to where the Pleiades will appear when they come back around in the fall. Darrell called this group the Seven Sisters, or Dancing Girls, but he told me, too, that in tribal legend they are orphan boys, abandoned at birth. Blue stars — there are thousands of them in just the one cluster, but only six are clearly distinguishable to the naked eye from this little planet. One of the sisters is missing, and there are various theories as to her whereabouts. These stars might also, as far as some ancient Greek poet was concerned, be a flock of doves. This, according to Mick. There is another group nearby, the Hyades, meaning “piglets.” I love that. But I keep thinking about those boys and hating that word, “abandoned.” It seems so judgmental, as if someone did it on purpose. As if she had a real choice.
The last time I looked, his eyes were blue, but they told me all babies’ eyes are blue at first, and that if they are going to change color, they do it over time. Aside from his eyes, whatever color they turned or stayed, he did not really resemble a white person — certainly not me — very much at all. He was a burnt-umber baby, with a little Where the Wild Things Are nose, and his hair was amazing: thick and black when he came to us, six weeks early and small enough to hold, like a drink of cold creek water, in two cupped hands. Darrell was gone by then, of course, so I couldn’t introduce them.
There are no farm animals anymore, save a whole new generation of frenetic and mangy barn cats. I want to remember to ask if they still call the cats Slick and Slim, interchangeably, just for the hell of it. I have to believe that calling the baby Slim started with me, although it could very well have been my dad, clumsily and chivalrously trying to take some of the pressure off. Even for the few weeks I tried to convince myself I could keep and raise him, I was afraid to give him a real name, afraid of what that would mean. Or afraid I would give him the wrong one. I knew that Darrell should be the one to do it, but I couldn’t even tell him. I probably wrote the letter six or seven times, but it didn’t seem right. It seemed cruel, where he was going, and it also seemed like he might ask me to at least try. I couldn’t chance it. I think I must have known all along.
I find my old helmet, and it still fits; the bike, after a bit of tinkering, runs fine, smooth, strong. I don’t usually stay gone more than an hour or two, and Dad mostly sleeps now anyway. For a while, he tried to do things the living do, like go out to the mailbox for the paper, rehang a picture that has fallen off the wall, cook eggs, play a whole Scrabble game. But it is all too much, too hard, and only deepens the lines in his face, exaggerates the curve in his back.
His frustration — with himself, with his lungs — shows in every movement, but he never says a word about it. He gets up in the morning for coffee and cornflakes and then goes back to bed. We, or I, if Mom is off wandering, generally see him again for supper, but except for rare occasions, that’s the extent of it. Unless I go and watch him sleep, which sometimes I do just to make sure he’s still breathing. It’s not always easy to tell. I catch myself trying to do it for him.
Mom has carved out a trail of sorts: a circuit that sometimes does lead to her lying on the railroad tracks, but the train stopped running on our spur before I was even born, and I hardly think that’s the point anyway.
There is an almost infinite number of back roads I can travel around here, to places where humans almost never go. The land is much flatter than it is west of here, but not as flat as people imagine when they think of the plains, and the roads do turn, and they do rise, and they do fall. There are mountains, even, scattered ranges disconnected from each other, and massive buttes like altars.
Sometimes I drive through the towns — deliberately, slowly, to see the people, maybe to feel some connection to them. It is summer, so there is no school, and small cadres of young men, both Indian and white, roam the streets, maybe in search of — like I once was — something to keep them here. I tell myself I am not looking for a certain face, for the father or the son, but of course I am, and sometimes I will circle a block two or three times to make sure. The white boys eye me suspiciously, but the other ones don’t give anything away. Nothing at all. In the towns, I do not find what I am not looking for.
I haven’t yet had the nerve to go onto the rez, so I get as close as I can, circling it on the boundary roads, seeing ghosts and real evidence of all the too-slow or terminally indecisive animals flattened on this stretch of highway. Fence posts that once cast a fairly regular pattern of shadow across the road are mostly down now, or lean into each other at crazy angles. I hear there has been some kind of economic upswing in this country over the past few years. The news does not seem to have reached this place yet.
One night, while I am outside lying in the grass, Mom comes with her own beer to join me. She sits cross-legged, making moustaches with her hair as her head bobbles like one of those baseball dolls, like it’s on a spring. She’s humming something that sounds like “I’m an Old Cowhand,” the shaking of her head adding a just-perceptible vibrato.
After a while she says, “Your brother—” and then she stops. But she has said it in such a way — or I have heard it in such a way — that for a second I think the rest of the sentence is going to create an entirely new reality; that she is going to tell me he really has been holed up in a cave in the mountains all this time — emulating Ho Chi Minh, writing his memoirs, collecting fossils and painting hieroglyphs — and that now he is ready to come home.