American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [87]
Mother and Papi continued on their respective reveries—she at her mother’s bedside, he on his shop-by-shop tour of the latest American inventions. Vicki was lost to her books. With no one to mind us, George and I started combing Rawlins like truants on a spree. We shoplifted candy from the five-and-dime, provoked rumbles with the little gringos next door, snitched cigarettes from our parents and puffed them out back. When George stole a toy truck at my instigation, Mother threatened to turn him in. She walked him, as he snorted and sniveled, all the way to the gate of The Pen. When she brought him home and thrashed him under the dining room table instead, he scrambled out with blood on his face. Soon after that we were marching down the street, our hands in Vicki’s firm grasp, headed for another kind of incarceration, on the very grounds where the loco had cursed us: the school with the pasty-faced children. Within its walls we spent endless days, freeing our parents to squarely face the anxieties, look death directly in the eye.
Grandpa Doc, too, was tense as a buckjump rider, numbing himself with work. He took on more surgery. He had always offered it free to Indians who needed it. Now he’d book himself solid for days, spelunking in heads, yanking his way through teeth, emerging one afternoon with four of my father’s molars. On weekends he was out on the ranch, working on his house, or down at The Rustic Bar. “Come with me, honey,” he’d say, when Georgie scampered off after Huey and Nub, volunteering to help them pound nails. “Let’s go look at them bobcats awhile.” We’d jiggle down the dirt road to Saratoga, where he’d sit and sip whiskey for hours. I’d sit at the oak bar beside him—silent as a stone—watching two stuffed mountain cats claw at the carcass of a doe.
The Clapp ranch spraddled out beyond the tracks of the Union Pacific, where Rattlesnake Pass cut through to a creek. The land was grave-slab flat, running a fast course to the horizon. But due east, just where the sun rose, Sheep Hill leaned up against Elk Mountain the way a calf in high wind leans into its mother. That bigger mountain rose haughty, unknowable, thrusting its snow-covered hump into a nimbus sky.
Doc’s brand—reverse Z, double quarter circle—was burned into the haunch of every cow, bull, and horse that grazed his many acres. There was a cabin, an outhouse, a shed, and, behind these, his new house, going up all white and perfect, like a jewel box sitting out on a table. Out by the corral, where the animals were kept, a weathered wood fence traced the foot of Elk Mountain.
There were only two other houses the human eye could see from Doc’s land. One was an abandoned shack he had given to Clem Riley, a black ex-convict who had knocked on his cabin door one winter morning, looking for a place to stay. Ole Black Riley, my grandfather called him. The man had lived there for years, working a vegetable garden and hunting jackrabbit, until he woke up one morning and wandered away in search of a better life. “Hey, Grandpa Doc, what happened to Old Black Riley?” I asked, looking out toward that shack and feeling a certain affinity for a man who would have been consigned with me to the other side of the tracks in Rawlins proper. “Dunno, honey. Took off, I guess.”
On the other side of Grandpa Doc’s land, where stone cliffs ran west like a frill collar of gray, where coyotes bayed at the light of the moon, stood the second house. The Widener place: It was four miles down the Pass and barely visible from Doc’s new house. Jack Widener was the cattleman who had hired Aunt Erma to teach his children. On a good day, you could make out the pillbox that was her school.
Over the rise, behind the Widener house, lived Old Joe Krozier. He was a wild man with a mysterious past—eyes as flared as roulette wheels, hair all a-kilter. “Now, he truly is a heavy drinker,” the Mormon and the saloonkeeper would say to each other, and then they’d both bellow and guffaw until tears ran down their cheeks. Rumor had it that after Old Joe’s wife had left