All My Relations Read online

  In daylight the mountains looked like no more than a pile of cinders. Milton chose an arroyo that cut through the scorched black rubble into red slabs, canyon walls that rose over his head, then above the mesquite. Chasing a calf until it disappeared in a side draw, Milton left the animal for later. The canyon twisted deeper into the mountains, the red cliffs now three hundred feet high. The polished rock glowed. Milton was twelve years old and his brothers were fighting.

  “You took my car,” Steven said.

  “So what,” Lee said. Milton’s favorite brother, he was slim and handsome, with small ears and thick, glossy hair that fell almost into his eyes. Weekends he took Milton into Phoenix to play pool and pinball, sometimes to the shopping mall for Cokes. He always had girls, even Mexicans and whites.

  “I told you if you took my car I was going to kill you.” Steven always said crazy things. At breakfast, if Milton didn’t pass him the milk right away—“How’d you like this knife in your eye?” About their mother—“Bitch wouldn’t give me a dime. I’m going to shit on her bed.” He wore a white rag around his head and hung out with gangs. Now they would call him a cholo.

  “So what,” Lee said. “Kill me.” Cocking his leg, he wiped the dusty boot heel carefully against the couch. Milton was sitting on the couch.

  Steven ran down the hall and came back with a .22. He pointed it at Lee’s head, there was a shocking noise, a red spot appeared in Lee’s forehead, and he collapsed on the rug.

  “Oh my God,” Steven said. Fingers clawed against his temples, he rushed out the door. Milton snatched the gun and chased him, firing on the run. Steven, bigger and faster, outdistanced him in the desert. Milton didn’t come home for three days. Steven wasn’t prosecuted and he moved to Denver. If he returned, Milton would kill him, even twenty years later.

  Milton’s horse ambled down the white sand, the dry bed curving around a red outcropping. Trapped by the canyon walls, the late summer air was hot and close. The weight of Milton’s family fell on his back like a landslide—his father, driving home drunk from Casa Grande, slewing across the divider, head on into another pickup. The four children had flown like crickets from the back, landing unhurt in the dirt bank. The driver of the other truck died, and Milton’s mother lost the shape of her face.

  Milton felt himself turning to water. He circled his horse, routed the calf from the slit in the wall, and drove it miles to the ranch. At dinner he told Oldenburg he needed a trip to town.

  “You’ll lose your job,” Oldenburg said.

  Milton ate with his water fingers, spilling food and the orange juice that Oldenburg always served. “The lives of O’odham is a soap opera,” he cried, trying to dispel his shame by insulting himself. “I love my boy, O.K.? But it’s him who has to hold me when I go for C.C. He doesn’t hold me with his strength. He holds me because I see him, and I stop. Sometimes I don’t stop.”

  Oldenburg served Milton cake for dessert and told him to take the next day off if he wanted.

  The following morning Milton lay on his bed, sweating. In his mind were no thoughts or images save the swirls of chill, unpleasant water that washed over him. He could transform the water, making it a cold lake that pumped his heart loudly and shrank his genitals, or a clear stream immersing him in swift currents and veins of sunlight, but he could not change the water into thoughts. The green carpeting and blue-striped drapes in his room sickened him. He could have finished a pint of vodka before he knew he was drinking.

  He could not imagine losing his work.

  Abruptly Milton rose. In the corral he fitted a rope bridle over the horse’s head. As he rode past Oldenburg, the man looked up from a bench of tack he was fussing with, then quickly lowered his head.

  “I’m going to the mountains,” Milton said.

  He let the horse carry him into the charred crust of the canyon. The scarlet walls rose high and sheer, closing off the black peaks beyond. Tethering the horse to a mesquite, Milton sat in the sand. The cliffs seemed almost to meet above him. Heat gathered over his head and forced down on him. A lizard skittered by his ear, up the wall. A tortoise lumbered across the wash. The water rippling through him became a shimmering on the far wall, scenes of his life. Milton racing after Steven, aiming at the zigzagging blue shirt, the crack of the gun, a palo verde trunk catching the rifle barrel and spinning Milton to his knees. His father’s empty boots beside the couch where he slept. His mother in baggy gray slacks, growing fatter. C.C.’s head snapping back from Milton’s open palm. The pictures flickered over the cliff. Milton sat while shadow climbed the rock, and a cool breeze funneled through the canyon, and night fell. Scooping a hole in the sand, he lay face to the stone while the canyon rustled and sighed. The wind rushed around a stone spur, scattering sand grains on his face. Several times in the night footsteps passed so near that the ground yielded beneath his head. Huddled, shivering, he thought his heart had stopped and fell asleep from terror. He dreamed of the cliffs, an unbroken glassy red.

  Early in the morning Milton woke and stretched, refreshed by the cool air. The only prints beside him were his own. That evening he wrote to C.C. in care of her California aunt, telling her he’d quit drinking.

  When C.C. didn’t respond, Milton wrote again, asking at least for word of Allen, who would have entered high school. C.C. replied, “When I got here the doctor said I had a broken nose. Allen says he has no father.”

  Milton knew he must hide to avoid drinking. When he asked Oldenburg’s permission to spend a day in the granite mountains, Oldenburg said he would go, too. They camped against a rock turret. The light in the sky faded and the fire leaped up. In the weeks since the former hand Jenkins’s death, Oldenburg had become, if possible, more silent. Milton, meanwhile, admitted he had been a chatterbox, recalling high-school field trips to Phoenix fifteen years before, and rodeos in Tucson, Prescott, Sells, and Whiteriver. Oldenburg, fingertips joined at his chin, occasionally nodded or smiled. Tonight Milton squatted, arms around his knees, staring into the fire. About to share his most insistent emotions with the white man, he felt a giddy excitement, as if he were showing himself naked to a woman for the first time.

  Milton told Oldenburg what C.C. had said.

  “Your drinking has scarred them like acid. It will be time before they heal,” Oldenburg said.

  “There shouldn’t be O’odham families,” Milton exclaimed. “We should stop having children.”

  Oldenburg shook his head. After a while he said, “Milton, I hope you’re not bitter because I won’t let you drink. Drawing the line helps you. It’s not easy living right. I’ve tried all my life and gained nothing—I lost both my sons in war and my wife divorced me to marry a piece of human trash. And still, in my own poor way, I try to live right.” Oldenburg relaxed his shoulders and settled on his haunches.

  Milton laid another mesquite limb across the fire. As the black of the sky intensified, the stars appeared as a glinting powder. Milton sipped two cups of coffee against the chill. Oldenburg, firelight sparkling off his silver tooth, wool cap pulled low over his stretched face, looked like an old grandmother. Laughing, Milton told him so. Oldenburg laughed too, rocking on his heels.

  Soon after Oldenburg went to bed, Milton’s mood changed. He hated the embers of the fire, the wind sweeping the rock knoll, the whirring of bats. He hated each stone and twig littering the campsite. His own fingers, spread across his knees, were like dumb, sleeping snakes. Poisonous things. He was glad one of them had been chopped off. Unrolling his blanket, he lay on his back, fists clenched. He dug hands and heels into the ground as if staked to it. After lying stiffly, eyes open, for an hour, he got up, slung his coiled rope over his shoulder, and walked down the hillside.

  Brush and cactus were lit by a rising moon. Reaching a sheer drop, Milton jammed boot toes into rock fissures, seized tufts of saltbush, to let himself down. In the streambed he walked quickly until he joined the main river course. After a few miles’ meandering through arroyos and over ridges, he arrived at the
big sycamore and went to sleep.

  Waking before dawn, Milton padded along the wash, hugging the granite. The cold morning silence was audible, a high, pure ringing. He heard the horse’s snort before he saw it tearing clumps of grass from the gully bank, head tossing, lips drawn back over its yellow teeth. Rope at his hip, Milton stalked from boulder to boulder. When he stepped forward, whirling the lariat once, the horse reared, but quieted instantly as the noose tightened around its neck. Milton tugged the rope; the animal neighed and skipped backward, but followed.

  During the next two days Milton and Oldenburg captured three more spindly, wiry horses. Oldenburg would flush the mustangs toward Milton, who missed only once with the lasso. The stallions Milton kept in separate pens and later sold as rodeo broncs. Within a couple of weeks he had broken the mares.

  Milton consumed himself in chores. Though the Box-J was a small ranch, labor was unremitting. In the fall, summer calves were rounded up and “worked”—branded with the Box-J, castrated, and dehorned. The previous winter’s calves, now some 400 to 500 pounds each, were held in sidepens for weighing and loading onto the packer’s shipping trucks. The pens were so dilapidated that Milton tore them down and built new ones. Winter, he drove daily pickup loads of sorghum hay, a supplement for the withered winter grasses, to drop spots at the water holes. Oldenburg hired extra help for spring roundup, working the new winter calves. Summer, Milton roved on horseback, troubleshooting. The fenceline would need repair. Oldenburg taught him to recognize cancer-eye, which could destroy a cow’s market value. A low water tank meant Oldenburg must overhaul the windmill. Throughout the year Milton inspected the herd, groomed the horses, maintained the buildings, kept tools and equipment in working order.

  Certain moments, standing high in the stirrups, surveying the herd and the land which stretched from horizon to horizon as if mirroring the sky, he could believe all belonged to him.

  Every two weeks, when Oldenburg drove into Casa Grande for supplies, Milton deposited half his wages—his first savings account—and mailed the rest to C.C. These checks were like money thrown blindly over the shoulder. So thoroughly had he driven his family from his mind that he couldn’t summon them back, even if he wished to. When, just before sleep, spent from the day’s work, he glimpsed C.C. and Allen, the faces seemed unreal. They were like people he had met and loved profoundly one night at a party, then forgotten.

  The night of the first November frost, soon after the wild horse roundup, Oldenburg had asked Milton if he played cards. Milton didn’t.

  “Too bad,” Oldenburg said. “It gets dull evenings. Jenkins and I played gin rummy. We’d go to five thousand, take us a couple of weeks, and then start again.”

  “We could cook,” Milton said.

  On Sunday he and Oldenburg baked cakes. Milton missed the pressurized frosting cans with which he’d squirted flowers and desert scenes at the CETA bakery, but Oldenburg’s cherry-chocolate layer cake was so good he ate a third of it. Oldenburg complimented him on his angel food.

  Oldenburg bought a paperback Joy of Cooking in Casa Grande. Though he and Milton had been satisfied with their main dishes, they tried Carbonnade Flamande, Chicken Paprika, Quick Spaghetti Meat Pie. Milton liked New England Boiled Dinner. Mostly they made desserts. After experimenting with mousses and custard, they settled on cakes—banana, golden, seed, sponge, four-egg, Lady Baltimore, the Rombauer Special. Stacks of foil-wrapped cakes accumulated in the freezer. The men contributed cakes to charitable bake sales. Milton found that after his nightly slab of cake sleep came more easily and gently.

  The men were serious in the kitchen. Standing side by side in white aprons tacked together from sheets, Milton whisking egg whites, Oldenburg drizzling chocolate over pound cake, they would say little. Milton might ask the whereabouts of a spice; Oldenburg’s refusal to label the jars irritated him. Then they sat by the warm stove, feet propped on crates, and steamed themselves in the moist smells.

  As they relaxed on a Sunday afternoon, eating fresh, hot cake, Oldenburg startled Milton by wondering aloud if his own wife were still alive. She had left him in 1963, and they’d had no contact since their second son was killed in 1969, more than ten years before.

  “She wanted a Nevada divorce,” Oldenburg said, “but I served papers on her first, and I got custody of the boys. I prevented a great injustice.” He had sold his business in Colorado and bought the ranch. “The boys hated it,” he said. “They couldn’t wait to join the Army.”

  In Hashan, Milton said, she and her lover would have been killed.

  Oldenburg shook his head impatiently. “He’s deserted her, certainly. He was a basketball coach, and much younger than she was.”

  A Pima phrase—he knew little Pima—occurred to Milton. Ne ha: jun—all my relations. “Here is the opposite,” Milton said. “We should call this the No-Relations Ranch.”

  Oldenburg sputtered with laughter. “Yes! And we’d need a new brand. Little round faces with big X’s over them.”

  “You’d better be careful. People would start calling it the Tic-tac-toe Ranch.”

  “Or a manual, you know, a sex manual, for fornication. The X’s doing it to the O’s.”

  Light-headed from the rich, heavily-frosted cake, they sprayed crumbs from their mouths, laughing.

  At the Pinal County Fair in May, Oldenburg entered a walnut pie and goaded Milton into baking his specialty, a jelly roll. It received honorable mention, while Oldenburg won second prize.

  Milton wrote C.C., “I’m better than a restaurant.”

  C.C. didn’t answer. When Valley Bank opened a Hashan branch in June, Milton transferred his account and began meeting his friends for the first time in a year. They needled him, “Milton, you sleeping with that old man?” His second Friday in town, Milton was writing out a deposit slip when he heard Bosque say, “Milton Oldenburg.”

  “Yes, Daddy just gave him his allowance,” said Helene Mashad, the teller.

  Bosque punched him on the shoulder and put out his hand. Milton shook it, self-conscious about his missing finger.

  Bosque was cashing his unemployment check. The factory where he’d manufactured plastic tote bags for the past six months had closed. “Doesn’t matter,” Bosque said. “I’m living good.” Before leaving, he said to come on by.

  “You know what Oldenburg’s doing, don’t you?” Helene said, smoothing the wrinkles from Milton’s check. She still wore her long, lavender Phoenix nails and a frothy perm. After years in Phoenix she’d relocated at the new branch, closer to her home in Black Butte. “Oldenburg wants to marry you. Then he’ll get some kind of government money for his Indian wife. Or he’ll adopt you. Same deal.”

  “It’s not me who’s the wife or child. I run that place.” Nervous speaking to a woman again, Milton rambled, boasting of his authority over hired crews, what Oldenburg called his quick mind and fast hands cutting calves or constructing a corner brace, his skill with new tools. Even his baking. “He has to be the wife,” Milton said. “He’s a better cook.” Milton leaned his hip against the counter. “Older woman. He’s so old he turned white. And he lost his shape.” Milton’s hands made breasts. “Nothing left.”

  They both laughed. Elated by the success of his joke, Milton asked her to dinner. Helene said yes, pick her up at six.

  Milton was uneasy in Hashan. The dusty buildings—adobes, sandwich houses of mud and board, slump-block tract homes—seemed part of the unreal life that included his family. To kill time, he rode to the trading post in Black Butte, a few miles in the direction of Oldenburg’s ranch, and read magazines. When he arrived at the bank, Helene slapped her forehead: she hadn’t known he was on horseback. Phew, she said, she didn’t want to go out with a horse. Milton should follow her home and take a bath first.

  They never left her house. She was eager for him, and Milton realized that as a man he’d been dead for a year. They made love until early morning. Milton lay propped against the headboard, his arm encircling her, her cheek resting on h
is chest. She briskly stroked his hand.

  “Your poor finger,” she said. “I hear Lopez has little circles in his shoulder like where worms have gone into a tomato.”

  “It was bad,” Milton said, closing his hand.

  “I can’t stand the men in this town, the drunken pigs,” Helene said. “I don’t know why I came back.”

  Helene wasn’t what Milton wanted, but he liked her well enough to visit once or twice a month. Because she lived outside Hashan, few people knew of the affair. They would eat dinner and see a movie in Casa Grande or Phoenix, and go to bed. Sometimes they simply watched TV in bed, or drove Helene’s Toyota through the desert, for miles without seeing another light.

  When Milton returned from his second weekend with Helene, Oldenburg was peevish. “You drink with that woman?” he said. “You going to send her picture to your wife?” Emergencies arose that kept Milton on the ranch weekends. After selling two wild colts to a stable, he took Helene to Phoenix overnight. Oldenburg berated him, “The cows don’t calve on Saturday and Sunday? They don’t get sick? A shed doesn’t blow down on Sunday?” Still the men baked together. At the beginning of the school year they entered a fund-raising bakeoff sponsored by the PTO. Oldenburg won first with a Boston cream pie, and Milton’s apple ring took second.

  Helene transferred to Casa Grande, and Milton brought his account with her, relieved to avoid Hashan. Conversations with his friends were strained and dead. He worked; they didn’t. They drank; he didn’t. They had families. Milton nodded when he saw them, but no longer stopped to talk.

  Fridays after Helene punched out, they might browse in the Casa Grande shopping center. Milton was drawn to the camera displays, neat lumps of technology embedded in towers of colorful film boxes. The Lerner shop’s manikins fascinated him—bony stick figures like the bleached branches of felled cotton-wood, a beautiful still arrangement. “Imagine Pimas in those,” Helen said, pointing to the squares and triangles of glittering cloth. She puffed out her cheeks and spread her arms. Milton squeezed her small buttocks. Helene’s legs were the slimmest of any O’odham woman he’d known.