Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

“But who is it?”

“Are you going to get dressed?” Slowly I start pulling on my pants, there in the dark of the bedroom, nine white patches swimming around me. “She’s a friend of Oral’s and mine. Father’s, too. Sort of the Jainlight men’s all-around friend.”

“But why? Why’s she a friend?”

Henry pauses and says, “We pay her to be a friend. I’ve got the money right here in my pocket. You’ll see.” I don’t doubt he stole it from Alice like he always does. “Here’s your shirt,” he says, pulling one out of the drawer, and then he leaves the room. I grab my shoes and follow him, not entirely sure about any of it, but unwilling to let escape the prospect of manhood and brotherhood all in the same night. He’s at the bottom of the stairs when I’m at the top. He looks up and puts his finger to his lips. A dim light comes from the living room. Holding my shoes I move down the stairs barefooted. In a chair in the living room Alice sleeps with a comforter pulled up around her chin. The tight little curls around her head begin to droop across her brow. Henry approaches her, standing over her, then looks over his shoulder at me and gestures to the back of the house. I move through the kitchen as quickly as possible. I bang into the table and knock a pan from the stove, catching it in midair.

Oral’s waiting outside the back door. His hands are shoved deep in his pockets, but actually it’s a warm night. Henry comes out the back door behind me and nods at Oral, and Oral without saying a word signals us to follow him. We head off with the valley before us bleached blue from the full moon, and the fences of the ranch jag across our view like white stitches on a wound. We make our way past the barn and the stables and I can hear the horses rustle and speak to the sound of our feet. None of us says anything until I say, once we’re past the stables, “Where are we going?” and then we’re quiet again since neither of them answers me. Finally I say something like, “She does it for money?” and then Oral says, “Will you keep quiet?” and Henry says, “That’s it, Banning, she does it for money. Like I said.” Then we go on some more until we’re to the outskirts of the ranch.

This is where the Indians live. There’s not much left of them at this point, one family that’s made up of a mother and father and two small kids and a grandfather, living in a single hut; and in another hut an old woman whose man used to work on the ranch before he died; and in the third hut Gayla, the halfbreed kitchen help. It’s Gayla’s hut we go to, in the dark. We’re all looking around over our shoulders, though I’m not certain what it is we’re looking for. The moon splashes on the trees like milk. I don’t know what to make of it that Oral takes a screwdriver from his pocket and snaps off the lock on Gayla’s door. It takes about as much force as opening a bottle. The two of them burst into the hut and I hear some muffled sound from inside. “Will you get in here,” I hear Henry saying to me, and I go in.

There’s not much to see in the hut. The moon lights it up clearly and I can see the Indian woman on a bed in the corner. She’s holding her arm across her eyes, maybe from the light, but maybe from something else she doesn’t want to see, I don’t know. “Close the door,” Oral says, and then he says it again. I close it a little ways, but leave it open enough so I can see her. Oral’s got her by the arms and Henry’s saying to me, “All right, soldier, all right,” and he keeps gesturing for me to come closer. I stand where I am. “You can tear her clothes off if you want,” I hear Henry say. Gayla cries out. The other Indians in the other huts must hear all this, but no one’s running over to see what’s going on. It’s easy to picture them huddling in their beds waiting for the whole thing to be done. When I don’t move from where I stand, Henry tears her clothes off.

“I thought she does it for money,” I say.

“It is for money,” Henry insists, “it’s just part of the game, doing it this way. It’s just a kind of play, you know. Like one of those things you write all the time. Come on now. Get that monster of yours ready. We’ll warm things up for you.”

“Me first,” I hear Oral command. Henry hesitates a moment and then obeys, taking Gayla by the arms while Oral takes her first. Oral’s finished in about twenty seconds. He groans and rocks back on his feet, and then nods to Henry and holds her by the arms while Henry takes his turn. Henry takes a little longer. Gayla’s stopped crying and in the shadow of Henry’s body I don’t see her face right now, and I’m thinking maybe it’s a game at that. Henry finishes and collapses back for a moment, then gasps, “All right, little brother, all yours.” But I can’t quite move from where I’m standing, and after a moment Oral says to me, “Come on, I’m not going to hold her all night.” Henry says, “We went to a lot of trouble on this for you, little brother. Don’t let us down here.” Slowly I take down my pants and approach the woman. I’m not quite ready. My body reflects the confusion of my head, neither up nor down. But I come up to her, exposed to her, and when I do her silence shatters, and she screams.

She screams. I think at first she’s screaming at the size of me, and I feel humiliated and furious. For a moment part of me wants to hit her. And just as I’m thinking this, Henry says to me, “You can hit her if you want. She expects it,” and that makes me stop. Because I know everything’s wrong. When she screams she isn’t looking at the middle of me, she’s looking in my eyes. It’s my face she’s crying out at. And the scream isn’t a physical one, it’s from somewhere else in her, and the tears are running down her cheeks, and her fear is tender .

And that’s when I know.

Don’t ask me how I know. I don’t know how. There’s nothing in her face that would give me any idea, maybe a certain wideness around the eyes. Maybe a flatness of the nose. There’s nothing about her that looks anything like me, as far as I can see, though if I could see further maybe there’d be something in the mouth. Maybe our hands would share the same lines, maybe our shoulders would slope the same way. Maybe her footsteps would fit exactly into mine, if mine were left in the winter snow. But she could fit so completely into me that I could never expect to know how I once fit so completely into her. Anyway, I know. I know at this moment.

And … things are jumbled now. They’re slow and they’re fast, and it’s hard to tell what’s happening between all of us in this dark hut, where what’s happening in our heads and what’s happening in our hands is the same. I’m not sure when Oral and Henry know that I know, exactly.

Big is the violence in me.

It has a sound, the slosh of Henry’s brains when I take his head in my hands. I suppose in this last moment before his ears run with the pulp of membrane and blood he understands that I know. The scream from him, well, it’s not much of a scream, really. A bit of a yelp. It cuts off mid-pain. If I were a bit more selfpossessed in this moment I’d prolong it a bit, to make sure he knows that I know. To make sure there’s not a misunderstanding . I drop him from my hands and he crumples to the floor. Oral looks at the heap of Henry there in the moonlight and the expression in his eyes is very satisfying to me. He looks from Henry to me, his eyes wide as dollars, and he bolts for the door. I catch him long before he gets there. He’s screaming so as to be heard clear across the valley, but the sound of it just can’t travel fast enough to make any difference.

I’m a little more selfpossessed now. I take one of his hands in mine and it only takes a squeeze or two to shatter every bone in it. I’m a little more selfpossessed. “Don’t mind me, Oral,” I say, “I’m just a big stupid boy who’s a sucker for a good joke. That’s all this is, isn’t it, just a good joke. A good joke for the big stupid boy.” Oral’s sputtering unintelligibly at what I’ve done to his hand. “I could do it to your neck too,” I say to him, “and unless you think you might like that, you have to tell the big stupid boy all about it.” I shake him by the neck long enough that he can begin to hear in his head the shiver of his spinal cord.