He studies the basketball court for a few minutes, yanks the cuff of his jeans up to pull a burr off his sock. He says, without looking at me, “Slim told me he met a lady on a motorcycle. He thought he might know you. He thought maybe you were one of his teachers when he was little.”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“I know.”
I feel a little sick, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I can’t tell if he’s mad at me. I have spent well over half my life thinking he would be mad.
“Do you think—?” It’s a dumb question, so I don’t finish it.
“Yes,” he says. And in case I have any more dumb questions: “I’m not going to do it, Ginger.”
“Tell him?”
“Yes. Tell him.”
“As soon as—”
“Possible.”
Of course I had not thought this through; had thought, if anything, Darrell would tell him, if it came to that, and then we could all just go on and do whatever it was we were going to do, whatever it was.
While I am busy thinking about what I had not thought through, Darrell is busy getting ready to say, “I’m not the one who left.”
I almost say, “The hell you weren’t,” but I don’t have to, because he hears me thinking it.
So this is the part where he is angry. As angry as Darrell gets, which isn’t very, or maybe it’s very, but it doesn’t hold. “That was different. And, yes, I should have told you. Do you want to play who should have told who what?”
“No,” I say. Because he did not say, “I’m not the one who left him.”
“Good. I don’t either.”
“Okay.”
He picks up the basketball, does that finger-spin thing with it, palms it back to earth, to the concrete space next to him. I ask what happened to his leg.
Multiple fractures, he says, while he was still in Texas. A bunch of white guys jumped him at a bar. Army guys, from the same base. “One of them stomped my leg with his shitkickers. No one even called the cops or the MPs.” He pulls up his pants leg and shows me the scar where the bone came through. I want to touch it, but I don’t. He spent six weeks in traction while it healed, which it did just in time to ship out.
“Except they were done shipping us out. They’d stopped the deployment. Just like that.”
“They what?”
“They stopped sending guys over there.”
“Enlisted guys? Or drafted?”
“Both.”
How could I not have known that? Because I had pretty much stopped paying attention, is why. For some years. For some reasons.
“So—”
“I was never going anywhere. Or I wouldn’t have been. Or, you know.”
Well, I’ll be damned. “So none of this—”
“Ginger. Don’t.” He’s saying we can’t go back, but that’s easy for him — I’m sure he’s already done it.
“Didn’t you?”
“Oh yeah.” He pauses. He drops his head backward and frowns up at the sky. “And you can if you want to, but it won’t change anything. It’ll just keep you up at night.”
I have two choices: believe him, or make myself crazy. Seems so simple. Flip a coin. Pick one.
I ask him if he wants to hear something funny. He brings his chin back down and turns toward me, raises one eyebrow. “Funny weird? Or ha ha funny?”
I say, “The first one, I guess.” I say I did end up going to Vietnam, looking for… things.
“Your brother?”
“For starters.”
“What did you find?”
“Not sure, but something.” I look down at my hands, thinking maybe it will appear there, like whatever the opposite of stigmata is. Are.
“Name it?”
“Not hardly.”
“Yeah.” He gets it. Me. He still gets me. Like when I was seventeen. I believe this.
But I still have to scout the territory, do some recon. Start at the beginning and creep up, or it will bury me. “Who was I then?”
“Ginger,” he says.
“I wasn’t really.”
“To me you were.”
“Exactly.”
He nods. Because, again, he knows. This is not something so easily sorted.
Ginger. Cupcake. Punk. Tinker Bell. Cookie. Stolen identities. Or borrowed. Some kept. Maybe all.
“Tell me the rest,” I say.
“I thought we were talking about Ginger.”
“Not yet. Tell me the rest.”
“After Texas?”
“Yes.”
They didn’t send him to Vietnam, but they held on to him and his bum leg anyway; he still owed them some time. So he went AWOL: came home for a week and then headed, finally, for Alberta. Lived on the rez up there and started back after the amnesty in 1977. Somehow he was included in the all clear.
“Good timing, I guess. Or they just didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”
“I’m glad.” Without planning to, I reach for the braid that still goes halfway down his back. His hair is shot through with a few streaks of silver. I tug on it. Lightly.
“You’re a pal,” he says. “Thanks.”
The years come together, not crashing, more like a folding paper fan I brought back from Saigon and forgot to take with me when Annabelle and the boys didn’t have room for me anymore. I am too dumbfounded to even wonder how such a thing could happen, with the years; how it could seem, if only for a moment, as though I have, after all, taken the most practical route (if scenic was a consideration) from point A to point B. It makes no sense.
“When did you find out?”
“About Slim?”
“Yes. That.”
“My uncle wrote me in Canada,” he says. “And then when I got home, there he was, for real, like magic. You always were a clever girl.”
“Not so clever,” I say.
He says something about camouflage, something about pain ponies.
“Pain? Or paint?”
“Whatever,” he says, smiling, and I don’t know why, but also know I don’t need to. “Ponies is ponies,” he says.
He pulls a loose thread from the hem of his shirt, wraps it tight around his finger. “I didn’t go home right away,” he says. “Slim was four already, by the time I got there.”
What? If he was four, that means at one, two, three, he didn’t have his mother or father. But here we both are, so how is that even possible? I try to picture him. It’s easy. I know just what he looked like. How long his hair was. How he never wanted to wear shoes. I can’t imagine a world without him, even though we’ve hardly met.
“Why?”
“They arrested me at the border for some pain pills a buddy gave me. For my leg. One bottle, but they gave me all the time they could get away with.”
“Where did they send you?”
“Leavenworth. Always keep track of your drugs, girl. And you can skip Kansas altogether. It’s as flat as they say.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
I get around — before long is too long — to asking about our son. He tells me Slim has been jumping out of planes about five years now, since he graduated. Smoke jumping. I smell sage, sweetgrass, tinder for the fires that come every other summer, like clockwork.
Now he wants to go to college.
“Away from here,” Darrell says.
I wonder if my mother has anything to do with this. Encouraging him to go away, but to something legitimate. Not to war. Not to the coast to try all the different ways of forgetting. My mother, as I have already said, is no dummy, and maybe Slim is her second chance. Maybe he is all our second chances, and maybe, more likely, I am the only one who really needs one, and including a cast of others just makes me feel less like the Lone Ranger after Tonto has had the good sense to ride off into the sunset.
“College,” I say. “That’s good. That’s—”