Section I

The moon was full and it was the February that it didn’t snow. I had my flannel pajamas on and my loafer socks, and I was in the bathroom looking into the mirror watching myself brush my teeth after One Man’s Family on the radio but before the rosary, when my mother walked through the hallway with the wallpaper that had the butterflies and the dice on it. She went past the bathroom door in her green kimono with that look on her face, her left eye cockeyed. I spit—the white toothpaste turned pink with my blood—then rinsed my mouth and the sink. By the time I got to the kitchen I could feel it too.

The kitchen door was open and so was the screen. The screen door’s spring had been disconnected for winter and without that spring to snug it back into home, the door drifted between open and closed, lost on its hinges. My mother was standing out by the gate by the time I got to the kitchen. That gate was unlatched and drifting too, like the screen door. My mother’s hair blew back off her face. She’d stood herself into the wind—wind that was blowing from a direction it had never blown from before. And the wind was warm, which was something new—something it had never been. Not in February.

“Chinook,” my mother said softly, almost so soft I couldn’t hear, and then she crossed herself.

“Chinook,” she said again, this time loud enough for the sky and moon. She said the word this second time as if calling out to some long-lost friend whose name she had forgotten, then suddenly remembered.

But the chinook was no friend; it was the name for the strange wind blowing. And by November, everything that had been stirred up and blown around by that chinook since February was all settled back down again. And all was finished up.

But nothing was ever the same.

That woman Sugar Babe was dead, and Harold P. Endicott was dead next, and then the nigger was dead. Always in threes, death, my mother would say, then cross herself. Between the drought and that year of the chinook, by November we were all finished up too—let go of, unlatched. The house got burned down, and the barn too, along with the toolshed and most of our stuff, and we lost the farm for good.

The chinook lasted all the next day and night until the morning after. When I got up that third day, my mother looked like her old self again. The whole time that the chinook blew on us my mother was a mess. That’s what my father said to her, You’re a mess, he said, because she couldn’t cook normal. My father’s eggs were hard and his mush was burnt and we had tuna casserole for supper when it wasn’t even Friday. That whole chinook time my mother didn’t put her hair up in the day and comb it out for my father at suppertime or put lipstick on or wear her clean apron over her red housedress when it came time to get things done. Besides the cooking, my father said my mother was a mess because she had just let herself go. Mom, my father said to her, just take a good look at yourself. You’re just letting yourself go.

Hawks blew in the second morning of the Chinook and perched in the poplars in front of our house. My mother watched them from the front window—crossing herself and watching them the whole day. That night we prayed the rosary, her mixing up the sorrowful mysteries with the glorious ones, eyes still on the poplars, though you couldn’t make out a single bird or branch past dark. The following morning the hawks were gone, my mother was back, normal, getting the eggs right and roast beef for supper. But those hawks showed up again, not in the poplars in front of the house, but in the stand of cottonwood trees up the river—not that I said anything to my mother about the hawks showing up there.

The red flags that hung on the fence were made out of old flour sacks cut into triangle shapes and dyed in Rit by my mother. My father hung the red flags from the barbed wire, one every mile for the four miles that our road traveled to the main road to town. My mother and my father did that with the red flags long before the chinook. In fact, those red flags hung there on that fence maybe even before I was around. I never asked, but I don’t ever remember the red flags not hanging there marking the distance.

At the second flag you came to, there were three miles left before you got to the house, and right there, at the second red flag, the ground went down. On that slope you could see on both sides of you for just about forever. It was a plateau caused by the river going down slowly over the centuries to the place where it is now, the Portneuf River—a river, at its widest, no wider than double the width of the main road to town.

Standing there at the second flag and looking down onto the valley, you felt like you were standing on the world and the world was in endless space, which is the case—I know—but standing there you really got the sense that you were standing on a round ball. You had to lean back to keep your balance, to keep from falling forward and off. Either that or you got the feeling that the world was as flat as a cookie sheet with a ripple in it and the sky was just a big dome. At night God punched holes in the dome with a needle that were stars. But in either case, whether you were leaning back so as not to fall off the ball, or if you were lying flat on the cookie sheet with the ripple in it under the big dome, whatever, the sky was the thing; the unstoppable sky was the thing.

There was sky everywhere: outside the windows, under the beds, between the ceiling and the floor there was sky. There was sky between your fingers when you spread them, and sky under your arms when you lifted them up. Sky around your neck and ears and head, and sky pressing against your eyeballs. When you took a breath you were breathing sky. Sky was in your lungs. My mother hung up wash across the sky. I swung in my swing through the sky. There was no escaping it. The sky was as everywhere as the nuns at the St. Joseph’s School said God was. Only the ground stopped it, and even then it didn’t stop there. It was all an illusion, like Mr. Energy, that magician at the Blackfoot State Fair, said. Everything was an illusion according to him. I used to get scared at night just thinking about it: what if everything—everything that was familiar to me, everything I knew—was an illusion and what I was really doing was hanging in thin air, like the earth was hanging in thin air, like I could see the moon hanging up there in the sky, a round ball just out there with nothing solid to hold it in place.

Besides the sky and the graveled road and the fence with the red triangles hanging on it, and the power lines, and the fence on the other side of the road, this is what you could see from the second flag up there on the plateau: you could see the road, straight as an arrow. Mormons built that road, which is the only thing Mormons are good at besides having kids, my mother would say, crossing herself: making things straight. That road went straight to the river, but never crossed it because Matisse County was low on funds for a bridge. The fences on both sides of the road were just as straight as the road. Mormons built them too, I figured. On the other side of the fences, there was barley planted, or sugar beets, or spuds, or alfalfa, depending on the rotation. But it was always green, on the other side of the fences—in the spring, that is—and after that things got gold and brown, but mostly brown, and especially that year. You could see our house sticking up out of the world like the tip of a sword that pierced the round ball and stuck out just that far on the other side. You could see the barn too, broad and tall. Looked more like a castle to me, brick, and heavy, not like the sky.

You could see the toolshed. In the sun, the tin square toolshed with its sloping roof was so bright you couldn’t look at it. Sometimes I used to think that the toolshed in the sun—sky all around it—was like God. You couldn’t bear to look. And even if you could, you couldn’t see. And that long, cool rectangle of shade from the barn was Jesus. By the end of the day, Jesus always cooled down God enough so you could look at Him. Sometimes the toolshed was Communism and the shadow of the barn creeping toward it was America. And sometimes the toolshed was the Mormons and the shadow of the barn was Catholicism. Sometimes the toolshed was my father, and my mother the shadow.

You could see the river from up there on the plateau. Well, not the river exactly, but the trees that lined the river. Out there on the cookie sheet, trees only grew along the river, except for the four poplars in front of our house. At one time there was a fifth, but lightning got to it. You could also see the stand of cottonwood trees up there where the river dog-legs, all twenty-two of them. You could see the catalpa tree that stuck up alone on the other side of the river, upriver about a quarter-mile from the stand of cottonwoods; and under that catalpa tree, you could barely make out the lean-to where the Indian woman, Sugar Babe, lived with the nigger. Then, to the southeast, downstream and across the river, you could see that big bunch of trees that I never counted, where Harold P. Endicott lived in his big stone house with his five dogs, Dobermans. Hellhounds, my mother called them, and crossed herself when she called them that.

You couldn’t really see the big stone house for all the trees, but you could always see Harold P. Endicott’s big American flag snapping in the wind up there in the sky.

You could see the road start up again on the other side of the river, beyond the trees, and keep going and going until the sky got to it.

And that’s it. You could see the Oldsmobile maybe, and maybe sometimes my mother or my father walking across the yard, but most of the time you just thought you could see them, when really you couldn’t at all. Of course, when you got closer, say, between the last of the red flags and the house, you could see the Virginia creeper on the side of the house, and the horses and the holsteins in the corral, and the gas pump, and the lawn by the back porch with the fence around it, and my father’s chair on the front porch, and the picnic table, and in the yard the machinery parked around: the tractor, the plow, the disc, the harrow, and all those things, all of them John Deere. And the most remarkable thing: the closer you got to the house, the more you could hear, and generally the hearing didn’t catch up with the doing, so my mother could walk out the kitchen door, and that spring—when it was hooked up right— would slam the screen door back into home, but my mother would be on her second step out of there before the slam got to you.

I didn’t like to think about that slam too much because it was more proof of that illusion stuff, or else that my ears were slower than my eyes. I couldn’t decide which, but I already had more than my share of things not making any sense; I figured I wouldn’t dwell on troubling matters anymore than was necessary. At sunset sometimes I used to like to go out on the road in front of the house, under the poplars, and sit so that the sun looked like it was going down right in line with the road. I wondered if you could ever fly a plane fast enough into the sun so that it was always sunset. Or maybe you could shoot an arrow as big as an electric pole right at the sun. You could sit on the electric pole and hang on tight, flying right into the big red ball, going fast enough to stay ahead of any sound, silently headed for bull’s-eye.

We never said much, my mother, my father, and me, when we drove to Mass in the Oldsmobile on Sunday morning. My mother didn’t allow the radio—said it was a time for reflection—so we were all quiet and examined our consciences for sins, which I was getting to have a lot of—one particular mortal kind especially. My father drove—he was always the one who drove—and we reflected, me in the back seat, like always, looking out at the red flags, counting them like mortal sins to the main road, and then on the main road the fifteen miles or so to Wind River and then to the St. Joseph’s Church for nine-o’clock Mass that we always got to at eight-thirty so we could make it to confession. On the way home it was different, but not a lot; still no radio. We still didn’t talk much, but we weren’t reflecting anymore. We were in the State of Grace. We always stopped at the Wyz-Way market, where my mother bought groceries and my father smoked Viceroys and talked business with the other Catholic men whose wives were buying groceries too. I usually read comics and had a Snickers candy bar and a Coke. Actually, that is what I used to do, before that year: read comics. I was still having Snickers and Cokes like other years, but that year I was reading other things at the magazine stand.

There was one Sunday in particular I recall. It was just before Easter. I’d given up Snickers for Lent that year, so I was only drinking Coke. The day was sunny and cold. I was wearing my blue parka—my winter coat that year—and two pairs of socks along with long johns that were getting too short. Those long johns wouldn’t stay stuck in my socks even when I wore two pairs. They’d slowly ride up, making big lumps where there weren’t supposed to be any, especially on Sunday. I was catching up on what interested me most. The only woman in Elvis Presley’s life was his mother; and Montgomery Clift had a secret death wish, though I never got to find out why Montgomery Clift wanted to die so bad. My father told me to stop filling my head with that movie-star crap and get in the car.

That was the Sunday, too, that we drove home a different way. I forget for what reason; I think my mother just wanted to try something new, so we drove across town, under the viaduct. When you drove that way, you had to drive past West Center and First Street by the railroad tracks, the warehouses, the St. Anthony’s Hospital, Niggertown—five or six houses all clumped together—and the bars. It was there that we saw that woman’s car, Sugar Babe’s blue ’49 Ford, sitting in front of a cinder-block building with a garbage can knocked over and garbage all over in front of it. There was a neon sign that said “working man’s club” in pink letters with a blue neon half-moon rising above in the window. We stared at the car and at the neon sign and the garbage all over and my mother crossed herself. I imagined Montgomery Clift in there drinking martinis in that special kind of glass, just wanting to die, and some guy from one of those houses in Niggertown playing a saxophone.

“That’s her car, all right,” my father said. “That woman Sugar Babe’s.” My father slowed down the Oldsmobile. My mother moved closer to the window and so did I. “Pat Mulekey back at the Wyz-Way was just saying today that’s where that woman works,” my father said. “ Waitressing.”

“Isn’t she an Indian?” my mother said.

“Full-blood Sho-Ban,” my father said. “Daughter of one of them old True Shots out there. Straight off the reservation.” “Forevermore!” my mother said, which was something my mother always said.

“Doesn’t figure!” my father said. “Those Injuns out there don’t like niggers no more than we do, and there she is, a full-blood, waitressing in that place. And living with one of them, too, out there in that lean-to!”

“Shh!” my mother said, and pointed to the back seat with her head. “Means trouble! But those kind of people just got a nose for it,” my father said.