27 Short Stories Read online

  "Well, put on your pajamas," Father said. "I don't want to look at that forever." Sam pulled on his sleeping shorts. "What's going on over there?" asked Father. "Nothing," said Sam. "You must do something all day." "I told you, I help her. She runs a clinic, and she also tends a garden. She's got no

  electricity, so it takes a lot of work." "I've done a lot of work in my time, Sam, but I don't come home like that. " "No, you always stopped and got it off with some whore along the way." The old bastard whipped out his hand and slapped Sam across the face. It stung, and the

  surprise of it wrung tears from Sam before he had time to decide not to cry. "I never slept with a whore in my life," said the old bastard. "You only slept with one woman who wasn't," said Sam.

  Father slapped him again, only this time Sam was ready, and he bore the slap stoically, almost without flinching.

  "I had one affair," said Father.

  "You got caught once," said Sam. "There were dozens of women."

  Father laughed derisively. "What did you do, hire a detective? There was only the one."

  But Sam knew better. He had dreamed these women for years. Laughing, lascivious women. It wasn't until he was twelve years old that he found out enough about sex to know what it all meant. By then he had long since learned that any dream he had more than once was true. So when he had a dream of Father with one of the laughing women, he woke up, holding the dream in his memory. He thought through it from beginning to end, remembering all the details he could. The name of the motel. The room number. It was midnight, but Father was in California, so it was an hour earlier. Sam got out of bed and walked quietly into the kitchen and dialed directory assistance. There was such a motel. He wrote down the number. Then Mother was there, asking him what he was doing.

  "This is the number of the Seaview Motor Inn," he said. "Call this number and ask for room twenty-one-twelve and then ask for Dad."

  Mother looked at him strangely, like she was about to scream or cry or hit him or throw up. "Your father is at the Hilton," she said.

  But he just looked right back at her and said, "No matter who answers the phone, ask for Dad."

  So she did. A woman answered, and Mom asked for Dad by name, and he was there. "I wonder how we can afford to pay for two motel rooms on the same night," Mom said coldly. "Or are you splitting the cost with your friend?" Then she hung up the phone and burst into tears.

  She cried all night as she packed up everything the old bastard owned. By the time Dad got home two days later, all his things were in storage. Mom moved fast when she made up her mind. Dad found himself divorced and excommunicated all in the same week, not two months later.

  Mother never asked Sam how he knew where Dad was that night. Never even hinted at wanting to know. Dad never asked him how Mom knew to call that number, either. An amazing lack of curiosity, Sam thought sometimes. Perhaps they just took it as fate. For a while it was secret, then it stopped being secret, and it didn't matter how the change happened. But one thing Sam knew for sure--the woman at the Seaview Motor Inn was not the first woman, and the Seaview was not the first motel. Dad had been an adulterer for years, and it was ridiculous for him to lie about it now. But there was no point in arguing with him, especially when he was in the mood to slap Sam around.

  "I don't like the idea of you spending so much time with an older woman," said Father. "She's the closest thing to a doctor these people have. She needs my help and I'm going to keep helping her," said Sam.

  "Don't talk to me like that, little boy." "You don't know anything about this, so just mind your own business." Another slap. "You're going to get tired of this before I do, Sammy." "I love it when you slap me, Dad. It confirms my moral superiority. •. Another slap, this time so hard that Sam stumbled under the blow, and he tasted blood

  inside his mouth. "How hard next time, Dad?" he said. "You going to knock me down? Kick me around a little? Show me who's boss?" "You've been asking for a beating ever since we got here."

  "I've been asking to be left alone." "I know women, Sam. You have no business getting involved with an older woman like that."

  "I help her wash a little girl who has bowel movements in bed, Father. I empty pails of vomit. I wash clothes and help patch leaking roofs and while I'm doing all these things we talk. Just talk. I don't imagine you have much experience with that, Dad. You probably never talk at all with the women you know, at least not after the price is set."

  It was going to be the biggest slap of all, enough to knock him down, enough to bruise his face and black his eye. But the old bastard held it in. Didn't hit him. Just stood there, breathing hard, his face red, his eyes tight and piggish.

  "You're not as pure as you think," the old bastard finally whispered. "You've got every desire you despise in me."

  "I don't despise you for desire, " said Sam. "The guys on the crew have been talking about you and this Indian bitch, Sammy. You may not like it, but I'm your father and it's my job to warn you. These Indian women are easy, and they'll give you a disease."

  "The guys on the crew," said Sam. "What do they know about Indian women? They're all fags or jerk-offs."

  "I hope someday you say that where they can hear you, Sam. And I hope when it happens I'm not there to stop what they do to you."

  "I would never be around men like that, Daddy, if the court hadn't given you shared custody. A no-fault divorce. What a joke."

  More than anything else, those words stung the old bastard. Hurt him enough to shut him up. He walked out of the house and didn't come back until Sam was long since asleep.

  Asleep and dreaming.

  Anamari knew what was on Sam's mind, and to her surprise she found it vaguely flattering. She had never known the shy affection of a boy. When she was a teenager, she was the one Indian girl in the schools in Sao Paulo. Indians were so rare in the Europeanized parts of Brazil that she might have seemed exotic, but in those days she was still so frightened. The city was sterile, all concrete and harsh light, not at all like the deep soft meadows and woods of Xingu Park. Her tribe, the Kuikuru, were much more Europeanized than the jungle Indians-she had seen cars all her life, and spoke Portuguese before she went to school. But the city made her hungry for the land, the cobblestones hurt her feet, and these intense, competitive children made her afraid. Worst of all, true dreams stopped in the city. She hardly knew who she was, if she was not a true dreamer. So if any boy desired her then, she would not have known it. She would have rebuffed him inadvertently. And then the time for such things had passed. Until now.

  "Last night I dreamed of a great bird, flying west, away from land. Only its right wing was twice as large as its left wing. It had great bleeding wounds along the edges of its wings, and the right wing was the sickest of all, rotting in the air, the feathers dropping off."

  "Very pretty dream," said Sam. Then he translated, to keep in practice. "Que sonho lindo."

  "Ah, but what does it mean?"

  "What happened next?"

  "I was riding on the bird. I was very small, and I held a small snake in my hands-"

  "The feathered snake."

  "Yes. And I turned it loose, and it went and ate up all the corruption, and the bird was clean. And that's all. You've got a bubble in that syringe. The idea is to inject medicine, not air. What does the dream mean?"

  "What, you think I'm a Joseph? A Daniel?" "How about a Sam?" "Actually, your dream is easy. Piece of cake." "What?" "Piece of cake. Easy as pie. That's how the cookie crumbles. Man shall not live by bread

  alone. All I can think of are bakery sayings. I must be hungry." "Tell me the dream or I'll poke this needle into your eye." "That's what I like about you Indians. Always you have torture on your mind." She planted her foot against him and knocked him off his stool onto the packed dirt floor.

  A beetle skittered away. Sam held up the syringe he had been working with; it was

  undamaged. He got up, set it aside. "The bird," he said, "is North and South America. Like

  w
ings, flying west. Only the right wing is bigger." He sketched out a rough map with his toe

  on the floor.

  "That's the shape, maybe," she said. "It could be."

  "And the corruption-show me where it was."

  With her toe, she smeared the map here, there.

  "It's obvious," said Sam.

  "Yes," she said. "Once you think of it as a map. The corruption is all the Europeanized

  land. And the only healthy places are where the Indians still live." "Indians or half-Indians," said Sam. "All your dreams are about the same thing, Anamari. Removing the Europeans from North and South America. Let's face it. You're an Indian

  chauvinist. You give birth to the resurrection god of the Aztecs, and then you send it out to destroy the Europeans." "But why do I dream this?" "Because you hate Europeans." "No," she said. "That isn't true." "Sure it is." "I don't hate you. "

  "Because you know me. I'm not a European anymore, I'm a person. Obviously you've got to keep that from happening anymore, so you can keep your bigotry alive."

  "You're making fun of me, Sam."

  He shook his head. "No, I'm not. These are true dreams, Anamari. They tell you your destiny."

  She giggled. "If I give birth to a feathered snake, I'll know the dream was true."

  "To drive the Europeans out of America."

  "No," she said. "I don't care what the dream says. I won't do that. Besides, what about the dream of the flowering weed?"

  "Little weed in the garden, almost dead, and then you water it and it grows larger and larger and more beautiful-"

  "And something else," she said. "At the very end of the dream, all the other flowers in the garden have changed. To be just like the flowering weed." She reached out and rested her hand on his arm. "Tell me that dream."

  His arm became still, lifeless under her hand. "Black is beautiful," he said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "In America. The U.S., I mean. For the longest time, the blacks, the former slaves, they were ashamed to be black. The whiter you were, the more status you had-the more honor. But when they had their revolution in the sixties-"

  "You don't remember the sixties, little boy."

  "Heck, I barely remember the seventies. But I read books. One of the big changes, and it made a huge difference, was that slogan. Black is beautiful. The blacker the better. They said it over and over. Be proud of blackness, not ashamed of it. And in just a few years, they turned the whole status system upside down."

  She nodded. "The weed came into flower."

  "So. All through Latin America, Indians are very low status. If you want a Bolivian to pull a knife on you, just call him an Indian. Everybody who possibly can, pretends to be of pure Spanish blood. Pure-blooded Indians are slaughtered wherever there's the slightest excuse. Only in Mexico is it a little bit different." "What you tell me from my dreams, Sam, this is no small job to do. I'm one middle-aged Indian woman, living in the jungle. I'm supposed to tell all the Indians of America to be proud? When they're the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low?"

  "When you give them a name, you create them. Benjamin Franklin did it, when he coined the name American for the people of the English colonies. They weren't New Yorkers or Virginians, they were Americans. Same thing for you. It isn't Latin Americans against Norteamericanos. It's Indians and Europeans. Somos todos indios. We're all Indians. Think that would work as a slogan?"

  "Me. A revolutionary."

  "Nos somos os americanos. Vai fora, Europa! America p'ra americanos! All kinds of slogans."

  "I'd have to translate them into Spanish."

  "Indios moram na India. Americanos moram na America. America nossa! No, better still: Nossa America! Nuestra America! It translates. Our America."

  "You're a very fine slogan maker."

  He shivered as she traced her finger along his shoulder and down the sensitive skin of his chest. She made a circle on his nipple and it shriveled and hardened, as if he were cold.

  "Why are you silent now?" She laid her hand flat on his abdomen, just above his shorts, just below his navel. "You never tell me your own dreams," she said. "But I know what they are."

  He blushed.

  "See? Your skin tells me, even when your mouth says nothing. I have dreamed these dreams all my life, and they troubled me, all the time, but now you tell me what they mean, a white-skinned dream-teller, you tell me that I must go among the Indians and make them proud, make them strong, so that everyone with a drop of Indian blood will call himself an Indian, and Europeans will lie and claim native ancestors, until America is all Indian. You tell me that I will give birth to the new Quetzalcoatl, and he will unify and heal the land of its sickness. But what you never tell me is this: Who will be the father of my feathered snake?"

  Abruptly he got up and walked stiffly away. To the door, keeping his back to her, so she couldn't see how alert his body was. But she knew.

  "I'm fifteen," said Sam, finally. "And I'm very old. The land is older. Twenty million years. What does it care of the quarter- century between us?"

  "I should never have come to this place."

  "You never had a choice," she said. "My people have always known the god of the land. Once there was a perfect balance in this place. All the people loved the land and tended it. Like the garden of Eden. And the land fed them. It gave them maize and bananas. They took only what they needed to eat, and they did not kill animals for sport or humans for hate. But then the Incas turned away from the land and worshiped gold and the bright golden sun. The Aztecs soaked the ground in the blood of their human sacrifices. The Pueblos cut down the forests of Utah and Arizona and turned them into red-rock deserts. The Iroquois tortured their enemies and filled the forest with their screams of agony. We found tobacco and coca and peyote and coffee and forgot the dreams the land gave us in our sleep. And so the land rejected us. The land called to Columbus and told him lies and seduced him and he never had a chance, did he? Never had a choice. The land brought the Europeans to punish us. Disease and slavery and warfare killed most of us, and the rest of us tried to pretend we were Europeans rather than endure any more of the punishment. The land was our jealous lover, and it hated us for a while.

  "Some Catholic you are," said Sam. "I don't believe in your Indian gods."

  "Say Dens or Cristo instead of the land and the story is the same," she said. "But now the Europeans are worse than we Indians ever were. The land is suffering from a thousand different poisons, and you threaten to kill all of life with your weapons of war. We Indians have been punished enough, and now it's our turn to have the land again. The land chose Columbus exactly five centuries ago. Now you and I dream our dreams, the way he dreamed."

  "That's a good story," Sam said, still looking out the door. It sounded so close to what the old prophets in the Book of Mormon said would happen to America; close, but dangerously different. As if there were no hope for the Europeans anymore. As if their chance had already been lost, as if no repentance would be allowed. They would not be able to pass the land on to the next generation. Someone else would inherit. It made him sick at heart, to realize what the white man had lost, had thrown away, had torn up and destroyed.

  "But what should I do with my story?" she asked. He could hear her coming closer, walking up behind him. He could almost feel her breath on his shoulder. "How can I fulfill it?"

  By yourself. Or at least without me. "Tell it to the Indians. You can cross all these borders in a thousand different places, and you speak Portuguese and Spanish and Arawak and Carib, and you'll be able to tell your story in Quechua, too, no doubt, crossing back and forth between Brazil and Colombia and Bolivia and Peru and Venezuela, all close together here, until every Indian knows about you and calls you by the name you were given in my dream."

  "Tell me my name."

  "Virgem America. See? The land or god or whatever it is wants you to be a virgin."

  She giggled. "Nossa senhora," she said. "Don't you see? I'm the new Virg
in Mother: It wants me to be a mother, all the old legends of the Holy Mother will transfer to me; they'll call me virgin no matter what the truth is. How the priests will hate me. How they'll try to kill my son. But he will live and become Quetzalcoatl, and he will restore America to the true Americans. That is the meaning of my dreams. My dreams and yours."

  "Not me," he said. "Not for any dream or any god." He turned to face her. His fist was pressed against his groin, as if to crush out all rebellion there. "My body doesn't rule me," he said. "Nobody controls me but myself."

  "That's very sick," she said cheerfully. "All because you hate your father. Forget that hate, and love me instead."

  His face became a mask of anguish, and then he turned and fled.

  He even thought of castrating himself, that's the kind of madness that drove him through the jungle. He could hear the bulldozers carving out the airstrip, the screams of falling timbers, the calls of birds and cries of animals displaced. It was the terror of the tortured land, and it maddened him even more as he ran between thick walls of green. The rig was sucking oil like heartblood from the forest floor. The ground was wan and trembling under his feet. And when he got home he was grateful to lift his feet off the ground and lie on his mattress, clutching his pillow, panting or perhaps sobbing from the exertion of his run.

  He slept, soaking his pillow in afternoon sweat, and in his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and led you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the press of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me.