Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

"He's with Roberto?" Joe asked.

"Where else would he be?"

Then that was why Sophie was firing pots at night. Things made sense if you just waited long enough.

"The Indian Service has riders from here to Utah looking for Roberto and you stroll by with his bacon and eggs?"

"You walk past them?" Anna asked.

"Yes. They don't pay any attention to an old woman getting clay. They're looking for Joe."

"I'm not involved with Roberto."

"That's not what Roberto says," Sophie told Anna. "He talks about Joe all the time."

"You miss your husband," Anna said.

"Yes. Tonight, the devil went by my window. He had yellow skin and silver horns and a rifle."

Joe said, "Sophie, do me a favour. Next time you see Roberto, tell him I'm not involved. He wants to play cowboys and Indians, I don't. It has nothing to do with me."

In his house, Joe lit a kerosene lamp and poured two glasses of Scotch while she looked at the photographs on the wall.

"No pictures of you."

"They're of my brother Rudy. I don't think he made it off Bataan. Funny, I can picture him better at night than during the day because we used to keep animals out back. I took care of the horses. Rudy had a rabbit hutch. We used to feed them in the evening and I can still see Rudy and those white does in the hutch, that fuzzy whiteness in the dark."

"But no pictures of you?"

"I left home. When I was fifteen I went to El Paso. A circus had its winter quarters down there and I caught on hauling water and hay."

"That must have been exciting."

"Hauling hay for elephants? Mainly, I remember sneezing," he said and gave her a glass. "Well, that was more words from Sophie than I can remember. You like being Thinking Woman?"

"I like the idea that I thought you up, that you're my idea."

"Your idea?"

"My biggest. What else did you do at the circus? I feel responsible."

"There was an old sideshow fighter. Local heroes paid $5 against $50 if they could knock him down. No one ever knocked him down. He showed me the first things about boxing, that's probably why I'm basically a counterpuncher. But the best was the circus band leader. I played a pedal organ a little bit here at the church, but he taught me the piano. He used to describe himself as 'a gentleman of the Negro persuasion', and he drove the Texans crazy because he dressed better and acted finer than any of them. He was a ragtime player. And stride. Name it. He hated me fighting, but that's where the money was; that was the ticket north."

"You must have been a good fighter. I asked you about the pictures twice and you ducked the question each time. You must never have been hit."

Joe studied a photo of Rudy on a horse.

"You know, Sophie's right. Indian men do work on their dignity. They don't talk a lot. As Oppy would say, they're non-verbal. They internalize everything, and to an outsider, which may include women, they may not say a word. They'll drink themselves to death or drive off a cliff, but they do it with a sense of quiet dignity. I'm not that Indian. I've spent half my life away from here. I've got a half-breed brain now. Lost the old natural dignity."

"You have better than that, you have invulnerability."

He was astonished. "Me?"

"You seem to be the giant who has attracted all the men from here up to the Hill."

"Look, Santiago is a poor place. This is still the Depression here, it's always the Depression here. For the last twenty years the most dependable income here has been from pottery, and that's made by women. One reason the men work so hard on their dignity is that it's all they've got. Then the Army took over the Hill. The men are happy to work up there, they don't need me as an attraction. There is a price. If the lowest caste on the Hill is the soldiers, lower than them are the Indians."

"Have you ever been hit, or hurt, or touched?"

"Lower than the Indians is me, because I'm not really from either place, I just serve as a go-between. At least the men from Santiago know who they are and have some place to go home to. Who am I? I am a driver, a joker, a mascot. I am the most insignificant person on the Hill. I am a has-been fighter, a so-so musician who's going to be scrambling for jobs in nightclubs for the rest of my life. A giant? That's a joke. I feel like I'm committing a perpetual fraud, a hoax, because inside is a coward. Men are fooled, Oppy and Roberto are fooled, but I don't want you to be. I didn't mean to enlist in the Army, I wasn't a hero on Bataan, I made a deal to get out of the stockade. I'm like the Gestapo, Fuchs was right about that. This is not self-contempt, this is simple honesty. Rudy was fooled. Rudy joined the National Guard because he wanted to be like his big brother. Dolores wasn't fooled. She said Rudy would be safe at home if it wasn't for me. When I ran away I took one son from her. When Rudy left, I took the other. She wrote to me in the hospital in Australia and said as far as she was concerned, I was as dead as Rudy. Not to write and not to come home. That seemed unfair to me, but after a while I saw there was a grain of truth in what she said, because I had tried to cut everything Indian away from me, and maybe Rudy got caught and trampled in the process. See, Dolores cut right through me. So that's why there are no snapshots here of me. When Rudy comes home, that's when my picture goes up."

"You mother's dead. You said your brother's dead. How can it go up?"

"You're Thinking Woman, think of something. Anyway, I have been hit and I have been hurt. And you, you could completely destroy me."

She sat across the table from Joe. The moon in its downward transit no longer entered the house; the lamp flame was the only light.

"I didn't run away from home. My childhood was very quiet and bourgeois compared to yours. I fantasized. I thought I would be an actress like Marlene Dietrich and have wealthy lovers. Then I thought I might be a female aviator who crash-landed and had to live with someone like Tarzan while the rest of the world searched for me. When I was rescued, they would understand that I had been forced to submit. There may have been wild Indians involved."

"In any respectable fantasy."

Anna took a deep breath.

"But from the age of fourteen on, my fantasies turned to fear. Not anxiety. Fear. That everyone wanted to hurt me, kill me. Not my mother or father, of course, or my family, but everyone else. The gardener, the tram conductor, the postman. The police, naturally. I stopped going to school for weeks at a time. Our doctor said I was suffering from unspecified hysteria. An alienist came from Berlin and said I was suffering from female castration complex. Perhaps so, but I thought he wanted to torture me. A crazy child! They took away my pencils, scissors, even my stockings. My father knew Freud. He wrote to him in Vienna. Freud wrote back to say I was suffering from a 'flight motif. More and more German Jews, he said, were suffering from 'flight motif, but it was his opinion that Nazi brutalities were diminishing and that a young girl should consider how extremely unpleasant it was to be a refugee. I remember he added in a postscript that all he ever wanted to see in America was Niagara Falls. There is some charm in Freud contemplating the great running bath of Niagara Falls. My mother and father were reassured because they were Germans first and Jews second. So I was sent to the sanatorium where sometimes we were given water cures and sometimes sleep cures, and where I hid in my bower full of numbers and bees. At lunch we listened to Herr Goebbels on the radio loudspeaker. Everyone had to. Actually, the doctors were kind. One who was a communist suggested a trip to Sweden. He falsified the documents without telling my parents, but I think they knew he put me down as Aryan. How else would I be allowed to leave? It took a communist to know how to do such things. He was going with me, so it was not all out of good will. It was an odd thing. We docked in Stockholm and suddenly I was not crazy. I do wonder, Joe, why me? Why, out of all my family, good, rational people, uncles, aunts, rabbis, professors, old ladies, babies, why was I the only one to escape? The question is, did God save me or did He just forget me? So, I am ready for a new God. Thinking Woman sounds to me like a great improvement."