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Prologue
After these many years it comes on me still,
whether a dream, a vision, or a prophecy, I don't know.
It's a shiny blue day in spring, not hot, no
shadows with the white sun straight up overhead. My father has just
spread a clean white cloth on a bare place in the sandy ground between
clumps of buffalo grass and prickly pear under a spreading walnut tree
still in the bud, and smoothed out the wrinkles with the side of his
hand. Ma sets the luncheon hamper at the center of the cloth and pulls
the wicker top back. "Don't sit in the dust, Charley, you'll ruin your
new suit before we get to Lordsburg," she scolds, reaching inside the
hamper. The only alternative I can see to the dirt is the tablecloth,
so I scrunch my behind over onto it, half expecting to be chased off
that, too. My suit or your tablecloth, I think-but don't say. I'm too
hungry to argue it with her, anyway. My father keeps his hat on and
his big new Colt revolver on the edge of the cloth in front of his
crossed black knees. Ma looks pretty in her dark skirt, white blouse,
and sunbonnet as she takes a bottle of lemonade from the hamper, and
next a rolled cloth with the knuckle ends of six big drumsticks
sticking out of it. Also there's a bowl of potato salad, white rolls,
and, for dessert, turnovers made from the blackberries we picked near
Pinos Altos last fall. I'm hoping to get to eat lunch with my fingers
before Ma reaches silverware out of the hamper. Indians use their
fingers when they eat out of doors-at home, too-and doesn't seem to
hurt them any. "H.C., will you please say the Grace?" Ma asks, even
though this is a picnic, so I don't see why. But my father takes his
hat off, stands it upside down on the tablecloth, and begins. "Lord,
we thank thee for these gifts which we are about to receive. Bless
this food to our use and us to--" And stops to stare at Ma like she's
been turned into the lady with the snakey hair she'd been reading to
me about just the day before. Only it isn't Ma he's looking at but
something else, behind her. Right now is when the howls begin, above
the sudden thud of hooves.
"The wagon, Jennie," my father tells her-the same
voice he used the time the pony tried to run away with my sister
Mary-and now he has me in his arms, running, and Ma's running too, out
ahead of us a little, toward the wagon with the team standing hitched
to it. He stumbles in the soft sand, almost going down once but
catches his balance at the last second. He swings me up over the side
of the buckboard like a sack of chili peppers and makes a standing
jump onto the wagon seat, then reaches across it for Ma's hand to pull
her up with us. Ma's face is whiter inside the white sunbonnet than
the sunbonnet itself. The howls have changed to whoops now and the
hooves are still coming. There's seven-eight Indians that I can see,
waving guns above their black flowing hair and lying forward across
their horses' necks. I see the one in front bring his gun up to fire,
and hear the crack of the bullet against the wagon bed. Then a sound
like someone whacking at a piece of meat and my father making a funny
sound as he rolls sideways on the seat, like somebody punched him. "Up
the canyon, Jennie," he says, kind of gasping-like, to Ma, "while I
hold them off-quickly, quickly!" He's gone then, clutching the rifle
in his hand, nothing where he was sitting before but the blood--blood
all over the seat and on the floor of the wagonbox, the dashboard too,
while Ma holding the reins in one hand lashes out with the whip in the
other. From behind there's the noise of a different sounding gun as
the wagon gives a lurch, throwing me forward against the back of the
bench seat. "Charley: Get down!" says Ma in a terrible voice,
but not shouting. The wagon's moving fast now, jolting over the humps
of buffalo grass, and I hold tight to the iron legs below the bench to
keep from being thrown out. My face is wet so I must be crying, but
the only sound I'm aware of is Ma's breath whistling in her teeth
and--all about us now--the terrible shouts and the howling.
There's a burst of firing behind us from the
direction of the walnut tree, followed suddenly by nothing. I hold my
head down like Ma told me and just keep holding on. The wet on my face
isn't tears after all it's blood, from the cut lip the back of the
seat gave me. Without looking over the side I can tell the wagon is
going fast now but smoother, like we're back in the Lordsburg Road.
Then another shot and we stop suddenly with a big thump, a long
whinnying scream, and a thrashing sound from up front. Over the top of
the seatback I can see the off horse on his knees in the traces, the
near one struggling to keep going anyway, under Ma's lashing whip. "O
dear God," I hear her saying, "O dear God!" The wagon's stopped dead
now, as the whooping cries close in around.
My Ma throws the reins down across the dashboard.
She jumps to the ground and runs back along the side of the wagon, her
white blouse covered in blood, holding her arms outstretched to lift
me down. I hold mine out for her to take me when something long and
black swings down like the pendulum inside the grandfather clock at
home, but going much faster. And then a sound like a melon bursting
and Ma's not there anymore but Asa Daklugie instead, leaning from his
tall roan stallion to lift me out of the wagon and pull me up to the
saddle ahead of him. The horse pivots on its back legs, and looking
down I can see Ma lying crumpled like one of Ada's dolls on the
ground, her hair matted with blood and blood all over the sand and
buffalo grass beside her. Asa's showing his teeth to laugh as he turns
the horse and rides over to Chatto, down off his horse already and
standing over my father with his knife drawn. I don't want to look
when they cut his clothes away but I've never seen my father naked
before, and so I do. They take his gold watch and his money and rifle
and the colt revolver and then they do Ma the same way, but this time
I don't look. The other Indians are up with us now, sitting their
horses in a circle around us with their rifles across the saddle bows,
watching. The butt end of my Indian's gun has blood on it, and hair.
It's all over in no time and I'm being carried away at a lope by the
laughing Indians, looking back at two long white bodies turning pink
already under the glaring sun.
All my life since I was six years old this dream or
vision, whatever it is, has come on me; not in the night always but
often in the middle of the day, and everytime the same, no change or
difference, addition or subtraction, except for just the one thing.
Sometimes, I've been with my brothers the Apache
from the beginning, and I'm the one that does the killing.
I.
Apacherķa
I'd have kept my trap shut until my dying day if
Jason Betzinez hadn't opened his big one first. He never should have
put Charley McComas in that book of his to start with, and then on
page one-eighteen he went ahead and told that lie about me. I sent a
one-line postcard with a picture of Geronimo on it to Fort Sill,
Oklahoma, asking him why the hell he did it and he mailed me one back
of President Kennedy explaining how, if he'd told the truth, it would
have reopened the whole question of what happened to the McComas boy,
and he'd wanted to spare me that. It was as good an answer as I could
have expected, or maybe deserved, so I let it ride and went ahead and
finished reading I Fought With Geronimo, from one-eighteen
through to the end. It isn't a bad book, actually, except for having
me bashed in the head with a rock and killed, plus a few other minor
mistakes here and there. Also, it set me to thinking about writing a
book of my own.
For years, I never got beyond the thinking part.
Then Jason went to his reward, age a hundred and something, and I had
a stroke and went to live with my granddaughter in Tucson until she
got tired of having me around the house and shipped me out to the
Morningstar Manor Rest home on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation
where we didn't have to climb down, across, and up the other side of
the generation gap as if it was the Grand Canyon. Now and again I'd
think to ask the nurse for a pencil and a yellow pad, but I never was
able to make a start, somehow. I know what I want to say, but it seems
like, with the writing business, just knowing is never enough. I don't
know how Jason managed it, him being a blacksmith and farmer, mainly;
he had a little help on the job, it says somewhere.
They keep me in Room 313 of Morningstar. The name
doesn't impress anyone, least of all me. (It's the Evening Star I'm
looking at from the window, you see.) Also the town and beyond it the
highway, all that traffic shuttling back and forth between Globe and
Tucson and the new ski resort they're building near where the Salt
River heads. What Indians want with a ski resort beats the hell out of
me, but it's none of my business, now. Yonder past the highway are the
mountains, blocky and blue looking, summer or winter, covered by pine
forest and cut away from each other by deep canyons where the
off-reservation Apache hid out while they hunted and raided, made
tiswin and got drunk, and the Indian agents and the soldiers at the
fort tore their whiskers and gave themselves the shingles worrying
about what they might have a mind to do next-after the Carrizo Creek
massacre, especially. (I can see the canyon rim from where I'm lying
this very moment.) Close in, under the window, is the main entrance
and the parking lot full of automobiles with wings, fins, and tails
like spaceships, where the new patients are brought (they'll be
carried out through the back one when their time comes) by their
families-young people, looking like they just walked off a TV show.
I'm glad I'm as old as I am, and won't be around much longer. Betzinez
always managed better in this newfangled A-bomb world than I did, and
he's a real red man.
The first part of my story's already been written
for me, and even so I can't get started. There hasn't been a day,
probably, when I haven't cursed my father for a criminal fool for
taking his wife and child on the Lordsburg Road after reports came in
of Apache raiding parties on the warpath, that miner killed over by
Clifton, Arizona, only a day or two before. The McComas massacre was a
big story at the time, articles and editorials in papers all over the
Southwest Territory and in Chicago, New York, Boston, and Washington,
too. According to the press, what happened on or about noon on March
26, 1883 was proof the Apache were a bunch of murdering devils, not
half-human and needing to be rounded up, every man woman and child,
and exterminated like rabid coyotes before what they still called in
those days "civilization" could get a proper strangle-hold on the
Southwest. The truth of the matter is, my father-a greenhorn tenderfoot if I ever saw
one-had less business in New Mexico than a Chinaman. (Already we had a
few of them in the Territory, and over in Arizona, in those days.) He
didn't have the knowledge, strength, skill, or physique-or the sense,
and never mind he'd been a judge back in Illinois-to meet the
wilderness, let alone the Apache, on equal terms. For years-until I
was approaching late middle age, in fact, and began to be able at last
to understand and forgive-it seemed to me H.C. McComas deserved
everything he got and worse, if such a thing is possible-and believe
me, knowing the Apache, it was.
I was born in St. Louis, where my family moved from
Fort Scott, Kansas. It was in Fort Scott that H.C.-as my father wanted
to be called-met my mother, Juniata Ware, who came from what was
called in those days a socially prominent family. She had a brother
who was a poet, as well as a lawyer; I remember him on a visit from
Fort Scott to see us, reading aloud something he'd written and Ma
making me and Mary and Ada (my sisters, older than me) sit still on
the creek bank with the picnic hamper while he did it, twirling the
end of his mustache with one hand and holding the little gilt-stamped
book in the other. Something else I remember from St. Louis is my
birthday party-the boys in black with white collars, the girls frilly
in pink and yellow and blue and white, all of us like little knights
and ladies of the Round Table in the books Ma used to read to me that
made me want to be a knight-when I gagged on a piece of parsley
and upchucked over two or three of the girls.
I believe we were in St. Louis maybe four years or
thereabouts. It was during that time my father developed an interest
in gold and silver mining in New Mexico and Arizona territories. He
was away for what seemed to us children a very long time, until I
forgot what he looked like, almost--except for the whiskers. He used
to write Mary every week and Ma nearly as often, though she could
still go from sad to ornery in the shake of a lamb's tail. My father
made many trips to New Mexico before arranging finally for us to pack
up and join him in Silver City in the spring of '82. (I remember as if
it was yesterday, watching from the rear platform of the train as the
ties ticked swiftly backward and the black smoke rolled away to where
the silver rails met at the edge of the flat, yellow-green horizon.)
We got off the train at Deming, on the Southern Pacific Line, and went
by stagecoach from there up to Silver City. It was already a fairsized
town when we moved there but the country around, wide-open as the sky
and ringed with bare rocky hills like teeth, frightened me. I recall
feeling more comfortable and at home after the furniture arrived and
Ma got the house all fixed, but still I used to cry myself to sleep,
as often as not, those first few months after we came out from
Missouri. My sisters were sent to school straightaway, but Ma gave me
lessons at home for awhile yet. I remember having to study
mathematics, history, geography, spelling, reading--and the Bible, of
course. My father bought a one-storey brick house with white trim near
the Hotel Whatyoumaycallit, I disremember the name. I do recall a big
picture in the parlor called "War and Peace"-you could see the war,
two European armies led by generals on horseback fighting each other
under a stormy sky, no sign of peace anywhere-and also books, lots of
them, lined out on pine shelves in the front rooms. And my mother had
an upright piano on which she used to play everyday-Mozart and Chopin
and Mendelssohn, whose Scottish Symphony was a favorite of hers, but
which I hated. She'd play the third movement, in particular, for my
father, over and over again, until I thought it would send me crazy.
They say the child is father to the man. In my
case, the child I was was no more the father of the man I am today-and
have been for eighty years-than Judge H.C. McComas was.
I still haven't written a damn line on this pad.
The day nurse-she's a white girl, not an
Indian-just came and took my blood pressure. Where she gets the idea
that pushing a pencil could give a man a heart attack beats me-someone
raised as I was, running up and down mountains like any Apache,
including the women, could do in those days. This girl's flabby, with
stringy yellow hair, a face like a fish, and goggles that look like
she's staring at you through the bottoms of two water glasses. White
people, nowadays, move like they just got their bodies out of the box
and haven't figured out how to use them, yet.
A few days after my heart attack my granddaughter
paid me a visit, probably wanting an idea how soon she's likely to be
rid of me for good. It's the federal government paying the bills, so I
don't see what her interest is. Juana's only one-eighth Apache, but
the truth is she doesn't appear like any kind of Indian at all. A
middle-aged beatnik in a black turtleneck sweater, beads, and jeans:
not exactly what you'd call her grandmother's daughter. She's taking
courses at a community college in Phoenix and thinks she's some kind
of intellectual on account of that. It hurts my vanity, somehow, to
have a granddaughter that worn-out, ugly, and oldlooking. Her
grandmother-God rest her soul--was the best and loveliest women I laid
eyes on, and her mother was something to look at, too.
"Gee-Gee," Juana says, "you're not looking well
today, at all. The nurse tells me you've been wearing yourself out
writing something on a pad when you should be resting instead."
I said the nurse was talking through her hat, but
Juana wasn't listening.
"What is it you're trying to write, anyway?" she
asked.
None of your damn business I wanted to explain, but
didn't. (I'd caught that word "trying," of course.)
"I always thought you should have written your
memoirs while you were strong enough to do it," Juana said. "Now, my
Communications professor says nobody reads anymore, everybody learns
everything they need to know from radio and TV."
"That's not Jason Betzinez's opinion," I told her,
"and it isn't mine, either."
"Who's Jason Betzinez?" Juana asked.
People are ignorant today, young people especially.
They don't know one damn thing about history. The only ones who do
know something are old geezers like me, who've lived it for ourselves.
I sat on the wicker hamper my father had placed in
the wagon box just forward of the tailgate, holding my knees apart
with my boots set firmly on the pine planking to brace the hamper and
keep it from sliding up behind the wagon bench when the sandy road
dipped ahead, and back against the gate when the road tilted upward. I
was just six and a half years old at the time but big for my age, not
quite fat, with a pale round face and yellow hair contrasting with the
dark eyebrows set straight above eyes like blue marbles, and a pouting
mouth turned down at the corners; dressed this day in March in a gray
wool suit set off by a black silk cravatte knotted at the neck and a
white linen collar folded down over the high lapels of the suit. (Betzinez's
book has a reproduction of the LOST poster my uncle had printed up
after I'd gone missing.) Most boys my age growing up in Territorial
New Mexico felt resentful and even humiliated at being made to dress
up, but I remember taking satisfaction from my fine clothes-so long as
it wasn't for church, of course. But today wasn't Sunday, and instead
of Sunday school and the long service that followed to look forward to
there was Lordsburg, the railroad town where my two grown halfbrothers
lived; both of them successful businessmen with handsome gold watches
like my father's, who worked for the Pyramid Mining Company in Pyramid
City and had promised to drive me out to the mines there and treat us
all to supper afterward at the big new hotel that had opened recently
in Lordsburg. I had a book along, as I recall--more than likely my
favorite, The Youth's Introduction to Greek Mythology-to read
on the overnight journey to Lordsburg, but the jolting wagon made
concentration difficult and so I kept the book in my pocket, mainly,
and paid attention instead to the gravelly cone-shaped hills blackened
by the ugly misshapen trees called alligator junipers, and also to the
picnic hamper that was my special care that morning. So long as it
wasn't riding too far forward in the buckboard, there was always the
chance to lift a corner of it without being seen by Ma, who looked
back at me now and again from the wagon bench as if needing to
reassure herself some great bird hadn't carried me off since she'd
looked the last time. My father's blackcoated back rose rigid beside
her on the bench and even the horses seemed nervous, holding their
ears forward and turning them one way and another, the way horses do
when the driver isn't relaxed, or hasn't convinced them that he is.
Leaving Silver City the afternoon before we'd been
lighthearted and cheerful, laughing at Ada and Mary when they begged
to be allowed to make the trip to Lordsburg, until Mary fell at my
father's feet and threw her arms round his ankles so that Ma had to
tell her to stand up, act like a young lady, and do as Mr. and Mrs.
Lucas said while she was away. My parents seemed in good spirits, too,
as the buckboard rattled along the washboard road, Ma admiring the
scenery from under her raised parasol and the Judge seated in a casual
position that contrasted with his black suit, white shirtfront, and
tall hat; sideways on the bench with his knees apart and holding the
reins loosely on one knee as he pointed out for Ma the peaks and
canyons of the Burro Mountains she was seeing for the first time since
we came out from St. Louis, almost a year ago now.
The rays of the setting sun spoked like a wagon
wheel behind Burro Peak as the horses lifted their ears and set their
noses toward the Mountain Home--a low single-storey building fronted
by a porch running its full width and set off by masses of flowers
already in bloom at the end of March--just off the road among the
darkening pines. My father took a room for the three of us and sat in
the sitting room with a cigar, while Ma changed out of her traveling
clothes into something suitable for evening and I washed my face and
hands and combed my hair, like I was told to do. Afterward, I sat in a
chair to read the story of Medusa in The Youth's Introduction
while Ma finished doing her face and hair.
Supper was served at a common table where the
innkeeper and his wife joined their guests in the middle of the meal.
Waiting on was a tall, stronglooking young lady with a black mane
below her waist and eyes like blue flames matching her
turquoise-and-silver earrings, browned the color of a chestnut pony by
the sun. (Even at six-and-a-half I had an eye for the ladies, you
see.) The conversation stuck mostly to mining and the importance of
the rail line between Los Angeles and New Orleans, completed the year
before, until one of the guests-he was the horsebacker who'd ridden
with us from the Tyrone Mine to the Mountain Home-set his fork down of
a sudden across the wedge of pie he was eating and said, "Lookahere,
Jedge. You don't want to drive on down to Lordsburg in the
morning. Not while's there's Indians about, I'm telling you! Why,
Clifton, Arizona, ain't any distance a-tall for them murdering
savages riding a bunch of horses they stole from the very folks whose
brains they--"
Ma made a harsh sound in her throat and the man
shut up right then like a slapped child. "Charley," she said sharply, "you are excused from
table now! You may take your book and read outside on the porch, until
the rest of us are through with supper."
I went outside and sat obediently in a rocking
chair with a tall wicker back and rounded seat on the porch, where the
elephant ear growing about the wooden rail lifted on the evening
breeze and the thin mountain air was already chill, feeling aggrieved.
I hadn't been allowed time to finish my second piece of pie, and I'd
wanted to hear more about the Indians who until this minute hadn't
interested me any more than so many Ottoman Turks would have, no
matter I'd lived in New Mexico Territory almost a year already. I was
old enough to understand it was the Indians Ma hadn't wanted me to
hear about, but I didn't see what harm there could be in it. The girl
waiting table looked like my idea of an Indian, and no one had acted
scared of her. But the horsebacker, whose name was Mr. Angel,
had my father worried now, and so it was looking like I wasn't going
to see the Pyramid Mine and go to dinner at the new hotel, after all.
But the Judge wouldn't hear, finally, of turning
back to Silver City. The McComas boys had important financial matters
to discuss with their father and business was business-as it was every
time with him. Later in bed that evening, I heard my parents
discussing the decision. "I admit Angel set me back on my heels a
little," my father admitted. "And God knows it's some of the
lonesomest, most Godforsaken country in North America. But don't you
see, Jennie, that's why the odds are with us altogether? The chance of
our running up against a handful of the painted brutes has to be a
million to one at least, in an area this size. Why, we'd have a better
chance all three of us getting snakebit when we stop for lunch! You
don't believe for one second I'd take you and the boy a single step
farther if I thought there there was any real risk in it, do you?"
Lying rigid in the darkness, one ear aimed to hear the answer which
came only after a long pause, I heard Ma speak at last. "Of course, I
don't. You decide as you think best for us, Hamilton." So we were
going to supper at the hotel tomorrow evening, as originally planned!
And my father: "After all, Jennie, we are people who put our Faith in
a just God, Who has promised us He will not let evil befall His
children."
Next morning after breakfast, Ma refilled the
picnic hamper from the Mountain Home's pantry and instructed the
innkeeper's wife to add the charge to the bill. Mr. Angel, who was not
continuing on to Lordsburg but riding deeper into the mountains with
his prospecting tools, shook hands with the Judge and wished him and
his family good luck. Then Ma climbed up to the wagon bench, I took my
seat on the hamper again, and the buckboard made a sudden leap forward
as my father, who though Virgina bred was no horseman (he was better
suited to Henry Ford's America than Buffalo Bill's), laid his whip
across the backs of the fresh and mettlesome team.
He grew increasingly preoccupied with the horses as
the buckboard began the long descent through Thompson Canyon, clucking
them forward impatiently on the downgrades with the brake set so that
the iron-rimmed wheels skidded in the thickening sand where the wagon
track ran, while Ma sat opening her parasol, closing it up, then
opening it once more as the canyon wall alternately shut out and let
in the steadily climbing sun. From time to time, assured for the
moment of his control over the team, the Judge pointed out for her the
grotesque rock formations thrusting against the violent blue sky, the
formal-looking gardens and miniature forests-like the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon-arranged on terraces spaced at intervals against the sheer
walls of orange, yellow, and buff-colored stone. But she didn't seem
to take a half-interest in scenery that morning-or in my father, for
that matter. Searching round for The Youth's Introduction to Greek
Mythology, I discovered I'd left it behind at the Mountain Home. I
began to blubber, demanding we drive back for it, until Ma turned
round on the bench and threatened me with her furled parasol. I was
shocked and surprised enough, I quit crying straightaway; whereupon
she told me not to fret, we'd make a stop for the book at the hotel on
the return trip.
Though the sun was hot the air in the canyon felt
cold, not just in the shady places but everywhere. We passed the stage
coming up from Lordsburg, the horses blowing, the traces jingling, and
the coach itself fish-tailing in the deep yellow sand as the driver
tipped his hat to Ma and saluted my father with his whip. Inside were
three roughlooking men, lying back on the seats with their hats over
their eyes and their arms folded on their chests. The driver had a
shotgun propped beside him on the box, and he carried a rifle across
his knees. The Judge had a rifle with him, too, tucked beneath the
wagon bench as a backup for the new Colt .45 he wore strapped under
his coat. I waved and saw, looking back, the tonneau disappear around
a shelf of rock as my parents glanced sideways at one another and
smiled.
"They made it through without incident,
apparently," the Judge remarked in a quiet voice.
"Yes, H.C.," was all my mother said.
They grew more at ease still as the canyon
continued to widen, until at last the mouth appeared ahead and, in the
middle, a big tree erupting like a still dark fountain from the desert
floor. Beyond the tree was the open plain, studded with tree yucca and
stretching away under the spring sky to yet another line of the
scorched- looking fearsome mountains that gave me the feeling of never
being safe anywhere, at anytime. And then my father turned the horses
out of the track and drove straight at the tree, gleaming along its
budding branches in the brightness of high noon.
"We're in the clear now, Jennie, I'd bet. No chance
for an ambush beyond here. Suppose we take our lunch up under that big
walnut tree ahead. I guess it is a walnut, isn't it? I didn't
realize you could raise walnuts here-way out West in New Mexico! There
might be money in it; I'll have to ask the boys what they think when
we see them this evening."
Nursing homes are God's trick on people who don't
believe in Hell. (Jason Betzinez died at home in bed, I'm told.) Juana
hung around a little longer, fidgeting and pretending not to watch the
TV show I'd asked her to leave off. The electronic thingmagig hanging
over the bed to monitor my heartbeat seemed to fascinate her-or maybe
she was figuring to see it quit. Finally, she said she had to go now,
she couldn't be late for her evening class in Phoenix. She gave me a
peck on the cheek, told me to do as the nurses said--and almost ran
bang into the night nurse on her way to check my blood pressure. The
night nurse is Abby, the Indian-tall for an Apache girl and handsome,
with a long face, straight nose, and black eyes like pieces of sky
behind the stars. (She reminds me, some, of one of Chatto's wives.)
Most likely she has Spanish blood in her veins, though maybe not much.
When she leaned to wrap the cuff round my arm, her black hair,
sweetsmelling, brushed against my face. She tossed it back with one
hand and pumped the cuff up, fat as a hognosed snake. "Don't excite
yourself, Mr. Daklugie," Abbey warned me when I pinched her swelling
thigh through the tight uniform skirt--me, who slept nearly every
night of my life for sixty-three years with a tigress, and my heart never
skipped a beat.
"Mr. Daklugie," Abby said, "your blood pressure is
still way above normal. I'm going to ask the doctor to check you again
in the morning."
I didn't say anything. The girl reached behind the
pillow and removed the yellow pad I'd hidden there.
"Mr. Daklugie, can't you just lay here quietly and
watch TV?"
"No, ma'am. I can't."
"Mr. Daklugie, you don't really belong here, do
you?"
"No human being belongs in Morningstar Rest Home."
"Here in this world, I mean."
"No ma'am, I don't. I'm glad I'm as old as I am and
won't be around in it very much longer."
"I understand you, Mr. Daklugie. I'm enjoying the
book by that old Indian guy you lent me, by the way."
She left with the pressure cuff rolled in her hand.
I waited until her footsteps had died away in the corridor before I
rearranged the silver chain and crucifix lying on my chest, then
reached the other yellow pad from under the mattress. The words had
started to come into my head at last, and there was an hour still to
go before supper time.
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