American Masculine Read online

  AMERICAN MASCULINE

  AMERICAN MASCULINE

  STORIES

  SHANN RAY

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2011 by Shann Ray

  This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-588-3

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-032-1

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923187

  Cover design: Kapo Ng @ A-Men Project

  Cover photo: Oli Gardner

  For Jennifer

  So every day

  I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth

  of the ideas of God,

  one of which was you.

  —Mary Oliver

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Robert Boswell

  How We Fall

  The Great Divide

  Three from Montana

  Rodin’s The Hand of God

  When We Rise

  Mrs. Secrest

  In the Half-Light

  The Dark between Them

  The Way Home

  The Miracles of Vincent van Gogh

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SENTENCES IN THIS BOOK have such grace and muscularity that they seem more performed than written, and the author’s images and events carry the nearly visceral weight of memory. In fact, during the weeks immediately following my initial reading of American Masculine, I twice caught myself struggling with what I thought was personal recollection only to realize that it was actually an episode from one of the stories. For example, I thought I had dreamt of a train and I was trying to describe to a friend how compelling the dream had been when I realized that it was not a dream locomotive but the train from “The Great Divide” curling about my consciousness, nosing its way into my life, making claims on my experience. The work has that kind of resonance. You finish each story with the understanding that something meaningful has happened to you, and though you may not be able to specify the meaning, you understand nonetheless that you have lived through something powerful and significant.

  In terms of certain formal aspects of composition, one might call several of the stories in American Masculine experimental, much as one might accurately call the stories of Alice Munro experimental. It is part of the magic of Munro’s stories that they never seem experimental no matter how inventively they are structured or how radically they are shaped. In like fashion, Shann Ray’s stories do not feel experimental. In fact, they feel almost old-fashioned, written with unfashionable seriousness and the kind of multidimensional characters that become forcefully real to the reader precisely because they escape easy definition. These characters are rich and fully imagined, and like real people, they are also mysterious and elusive.

  American Masculine is a powerful, resonant work of literature, and Shann Ray is a masterful and original writer.

  ON JUDGING THE CONTEST

  What one hopes for when judging a contest is that one entry will stand out like a giant above the rest, and the only difficulty one will have is finding an adequate stepladder to complete the coronation. And so I was simultaneously distressed and delighted to find that of the ten finalists for the Bakeless Prize, eight were goliaths worthy of publication, praise, and admiration. I was distressed because I knew that all but one of these worthy books would not be awarded the prize, and because I had so much work yet to do to choose among them, and at the same time I was delighted because the work entailed rereading such fine works of fiction. After a second read of each, I narrowed the list to three, and I ultimately chose one. It is the best of a very strong lot, and I am grateful to the preliminary judges who screened the manuscripts and selected from the many hundreds of entries the ten outstanding works that arrived on my doorstep in a mammoth and utterly daunting cardboard box. Screening manuscripts in such contests is difficult, demanding, and thankless work, and so I’d like to offer them thanks by name: Will Allison, Lauren Groff, Skip Horack, Alex Espinoza, Aryn Kyle, Kirsten Menger-Anderson, Matthew Pitt, Salvatore Scibona, and Steve Wingate. You have my gratitude, as do Jennifer Bates and Michael Collier, for their patience, kindness, and goodwill. Thanks also to Graywolf Press for its commitment to the publication of literature.

  Robert Boswell

  AMERICAN MASCULINE

  —for Cleveland Highwalker, my father’s good friend, gone now

  HOW WE FALL

  BENJAMIN KILLSNIGHT sat in the easy chair in his living room after dark, clear amber drink in hand. He stared straight ahead. She was out getting bent again, while he stayed home. He’d lived in Billings for some time, young and strong in the city, director of youth programs for the downtown YMCA, Northern Cheyenne, and proud. But being away from his people he had to admit he’d gone wrong. Urban time was all speed, nothing like rez time, and he hadn’t gained a taste for it, even if he was well liked in city league basketball and at work and nearly everywhere he went.

  Grandson of Raymond Killsnight, he’d borrowed his grandfather’s elk-bone breastplate, framed it in a shadow box and placed it over the cherrywood mantle of the fireplace next to the small black-framed picture of his grandpa in full regalia. His grandfather’s face looked out at him, strong and hard like the face of a mountain. Benjamin had aligned five white colonnade candles on the tile below the mantle and now their bright fires shone in the dark like a small upside-down sky.

  In America, he thought, if you were to be a man, and if you wanted a woman, you borrowed boldness. Each man had it to varying degrees, the verve that drew women, the force, the facade, the dream with which he governed his own interplay of looks and presence and urgency. Benjamin lived in a small house, seven hundred square feet, down in the tight-fit tracts a couple of blocks south of Montana Avenue and back west again toward I-90. He thought of his wife, Sadie. For her he’d always had nothing but urgency.

  THE NEXT DAY near dusk he drove slow on I-90 past the oil refinery, a bit delirious from the vodka he’d taken from his cache in the fill water of the toilet at work. Even lifting the back you couldn’t see the bottle, label-less, there under the buoy. He drove east toward the Dakotas, away from all the lights, the refinery’s night fires. Exultant and married at twenty-three, he was one of the Beautiful People, an athlete, and in the seat next to him in the burn of sundown was his white woman wife, made like a feather, shaft of bones and thin body illumined. Her face to the side, she stared out the window as the freeway set itself along the gunmetal gray of the river. He wanted to find a turnout somewhere between here and I-94. Park the car. Look at the river. Drink together.

  He’d seen three friends die his senior year at St. Labre, the Catholic school thirty miles east of Lame Deer, on the edge of the reservation. Joe Big Head hung himself in his own bedroom, Elmore Running Dog was knifed in the chest in broad daylight, and Michael Bear Below was shot with a high-powered rifle at a party in Plenty Coups on the Crow rez. The bullet pierced the skull and killed him instantly. He’d known them all since kindergarten. He looked at Sadie in the passenger seat and knew she struggled with life and with herself and he wondered
what kept her alive. After his father’s death from alcohol he had no mother to speak of, and thinking of it he always felt dark. Sadie, for her part, had no father. Different lives, same story.

  Even Benjamin’s grandfather Leonard had taken the tribe’s money, boarded a train on the Hi-Line bound for Spokane, and never returned. In a different light, when Benjamin left the rez he borrowed his father’s swagger, the way he could look the white man in the eye and smile, drunk or not, and it led Benjamin to an associate arts degree from Miles Community College in Miles City, where he’d played shooting guard, and then to a BA in physical education from Eastern Montana College in Billings.

  Benjamin had been a drinker since an uncle started him on it in grade school. Same uncle forced a drunk Sioux woman on him when Ben was thirteen and he had run from the house, crying from her terrible fingers.

  SCANNING THE RIVER from a lookout near the frontage road, Sadie drunk and gone in his lap, Benjamin made what seemed like an unlikely pact with heaven—with the Holy Spirit, she’d say if she was awake; the Great Spirit, he’d counter and they’d smile. A pistol of verve and fire: that was Sadie. She didn’t care who she spoke to, or what about. She was thin and fast and beautiful, and seeing her passed out again sobered him. He brushed the hair back to see her face. Hard to hold, that one. Elusive as the wind. But he loved her like he loved wilderness. She was made of untame things, and mystery. So right then and there he vowed to stop drinking.

  It took three years to celebrate his first full year of sobriety, and when it happened he called his brother, Titus, back in Lame Deer to tell him. Benjamin had gotten a monkey fist from his sponsor that night, a leather necklace with a small leather knot signifying a year free. Sadie wasn’t into it. “Parched, enit,” Titus said, laughing, then he said, “I got a daughter now.” He said it so quiet Benjamin wasn’t sure he heard.

  “A daughter?” Benjamin said, rolling the monkey fist between thumb and forefinger.

  “Yeah,” Titus answered. “Her name is Elsie.”

  A daughter, thought Benjamin, I’m her uncle, and when he hung up the phone he opened his front door. He wanted to whoop at the top of his lungs. Instead he clenched his fists to his chest and said under his breath, “Yes!”

  IN WINTER of that year Benjamin caught Sadie sleeping with his best friend from high school, Jack Plenty Buffalo, who was visiting from Lame Deer. Benjamin threw Jack naked out the back door, beat him unconscious, and broke out three of his teeth. Sadie revived Jack and that night Benjamin forgave all like a good rez boy and relapsed, sucking beer and Canadian whiskey from a plastic bottle with Sadie and Jack until past two, sometimes laughing and hacking so hard he cried. In the morning Jack left and two nights later Benjamin drove Montana Avenue and cut down across the river and out into the river valley to attend the AA meeting in a back room at the Christian Missionary Alliance Church, set like a small barn in the fields. His wife, head high, face like a flint, accompanied him.

  He worked on small hopes, and limited understanding. When he walked, the details came to his brain cleaner and less muddied, the outline of an aspen on the rise below the rim rock, the way the river met the riverbed and banked away south.

  A month into his second real sobriety he found Sadie naked and passed out on the couch with a recent AA group member named Richard. Benjamin was more prepared this time. He left a note in the bathroom saying, I love you, Sadie. I want to stay married to you. Are you willing to give up drinking? He left the house and ate dinner with his sponsor, a man with thirty years’ sobriety who was a member of the Spokane Tribe. Afterward they stood outside his sponsor’s van and lit sweetgrass and prayed together and when Benjamin came home at 11:00 p.m. Sadie was gone. Her own message, placed on his pillow, written in clean blue cursive on a yellow pastel sticky note, said I’m sorry.

  FOR HER PART, Sadie took the small stash of money they had and bought a bus ticket to Seattle. When she arrived she went to Pike Place Market and panhandled enough change to buy three bottles of cheap wine, drinking each one quickly until she passed out on the grass in a public square overlooking the Sound. Unconscious, she was arrested and carried to jail.

  She woke on a hard metal bench inside a holding cell and stared at the wall and whispered, “He was nothing to me.” She bit at her cuticles, making them bleed. Her face felt swollen. We hide behind our faces, she thought, we make our faces like armor. She went from jail to a homeless shelter for women where the state let her work off her fine and when she’d paid her debt she wandered out into the night where in a dark low-ceilinged bar she found a job as a cocktail waitress. She passed like a day-ghost between the shelter and the bar until she’d made enough money for a one-room apartment in the flats south of downtown. She worked, kept the apartment clean, and drank at least two pints a day.

  After nearly a year, and a string of men, she was kicked out for not paying rent. She kept working and drinking and went back to living at the shelter, where she slept during the day and rose at night, and it was on one of these nights that a man approached her in the dark hull of the bar and said, I’ve been watching you, and she said, Thanks, and when the night ended she went with him to his single-wide trailer in the slipshod housing, disjointed, largely colorless, south of the industrial zone. The place seemed smaller inside, single dim light from the kitchen. It felt good to forget, though she knew it amounted only to emptiness. Lying together, drunk and high, his question barely registered…“You said you were married. Tell me about your husband?”

  “He is nothing to me,” she repeated.

  In the early morning she touched a thin sheen of water in the bottom of the kitchen sink. She moved her index finger in a cursive pattern and wrote Benjamin’s full name, then erased it, then wrote her own name. The nature of the lines and their slow evaporation worked at her like a thing that gnawed bone. Life is no solace, she told herself, and went back to bed.

  She kept on this way for six months, before she left the man and the job the same day and walked among the abandoned storefronts downtown where she shuffled her feet and panhandled and drank until she found an alcove in an alley she thought lent enough shelter to avoid being taken to jail again. She leaned a long slab of soiled cardboard over her body and slept. Night following day she trudged and slept and put down liquor and gathered a little food. She traded clothes once at the House of Charity off Royal Street downtown, continuing this way for near a month undiscovered. At the end of it she walked into the public restroom in the small park above the Alaska Way Viaduct. She stared at her face, pocked and streaked with dirt. Her eyes looked foreign and blown out.

  Just outside the bathroom a middle-aged white man in a pin-striped business suit propositioned her, saying he’d pay for favors. She refused and walked back into the bathroom. She took off her coat, a light windbreaker she’d kept since Billings, then removed her shirt and her skirt and used the hand soap to wash her upper body, her face, her hair. She put her head beneath the hand dryer and dried her hair, combing it with her fingers. She took her clothes and worked the larger blemishes by rubbing the soap to a lather, rinsing each stain and repeating the process until the clothing looked respectable. She dried her shirt and skirt and coat under the hand dryer. When it was done she folded the coat neatly, put her clothes back on and tucked the shirt in and looked at herself in the mirror again. The shirt was dark blue, too large, shapeless. The skirt was outdated, but decent. Long-sleeved shirt, long skirt; they covered her bruises well enough. Her face seemed not her own but at least it wasn’t filthy anymore.

  She strode outside and walked to the area downtown where the glass and metal glowed and the people came in droves from their high-powered jobs. Happy hour, they’d stop in the bars before going home. She’d have to work fast with the city ordinance that disallowed panhandling … police roaming like predators. There were a good twenty or thirty bars in the business sector. She only needed a little. She approached the kind-faced ones first, but later, indiscriminate, she confronted everyone she enco
untered. Laying out her hands she said, “Please, can I have some money? I’m trying to get home.” Same lines. Sincerely delivered. Mostly she received nothing, but some gave more than others, and that’s all she’d need, just some. At the end of two hours she had eighty-three dollars and change. She needed more. She saw a woman dressed all in gold, walking with two friends, laughing, smiling. Sadie approached and said “Please,” and the woman barely looked at her and gave her a hundred dollar bill and walked on.

  Sadie stared at the bill in her hand, then at the woman advancing up the sidewalk. Already a half a block away the woman walked unconcerned, as if nothing had passed between them. “Thank you,” Sadie whispered, and she turned and walked south and west again.

  Among the superstructures that towered over her, Sadie tramped toward the Sound, the last light of day awash in the street, a huge cold light that turned buildings and cars and people pink, as if everyone blushed, she thought. As if everyone was ashamed, and everyone beautiful. She entered the Greyhound depot and took the night bus to Billings on a weekday special for eighty dollars. When she arrived the following night she walked from the depot through the stunted buildings of downtown Billings, below the hospitals, and into the city to the YMCA. She peered in the front window for a moment but kept moving and walked to the Amtrak station just past First. From the phone booth near the door she thought she might call Benjamin but thought better of it. She boarded the North Coast Hiawatha at 10:00 a.m. and rode nineteen hours, arriving in Minneapolis aching and hungry, her cravings awake and ravenous like animals. She sat down near the drinking fountain in the station and wiped the sweat from her forehead and drank as much water as she could. She filled her stomach. She knew she couldn’t arrive drunk. She walked most of the day, panhandled some, and took the last stretch by cab.