by Vincent Czyz

An excerpt from his novel, Ghost Dancer

Uncle Cal never brought Logan a thing Logan’s mother hadn’t put him up to buying. Nothing Logan wanted anyway. Cal had been too busy getting rid of things, selling them off for liquor money. Unless it was something he’d killed. Nothing Cal liked better than a hunting trip. When he came back, he used to make Logan get his hand inside what he’d killed, scoop out entrails with the stink of blood and something sulfurous curling in his nostrils. No wonder sulphur was rumored to be the reek of evil, the intestines a hot foundry where life came to an ignominious end. And what the body couldn’t use fed hordes of bacteria.

Two fingers. Uncle Cal had held up his own two, thick enough, strong enough to break tiny furrows into winter earth. Start up near the breast-bone–pheasant or a squirrel usually–with those two fingers, scrape out every soft thing that comes away. Cal told him Bushmen in Australia squeezed the water out of animal guts they had it so hard. Be grateful you don’t have to stick your nose in there and suck on stinking intestines when you want a drink.

Cal was short and squat, his head hung low on his stocky body as if he had been made to carry heavy things on his back over long distances. His forearms were thick and his face wide and scarred. One scar ran through his lip down toward his chin, the other was a jagged streak through an eyebrow. He’d gotten both of them while fighting.

About the only thing he ever asked Cal for was the beak of a woodcock. But Cal broke it off too short, that long elegant bill, with his impetuous over-goddamn-sized fingers, and Logan didn’t want it anymore. It sat in his palm, hardly recognizable, something he’d hoped to save thinking it would somehow redeem the bird’s death to hold this thing sacred. Cal had given it a try, thought, it just wasn’t in him, there just wasn’t any sympathy’no innate feel for things outside himself. For the rest of the four-leggeds, two-leggeds, wingeds, no-leggeds sharing the planet. The Maker, maybe, had been running out of earth when shaping Cal, had had to reach up high for some moon dust to mix in. Cal couldn’t be blamed for his coldness considering his bones were heavy not with calcium, but with memories of a waterless, airless, heatless expanse that stretched across his whole existence, from nebulous conception to that long walk toward the last hill in the distance.

What was it like to be held up by bones filled with elemental knowing, knowing that the whole goddamn shebang was mostly empty space from the atom on up to the galaxy with suns spread so far apart goddamn centuries would pass if you tried to cross it, and what ain’t empty space was 99 percent goddamn helium and just-waitin-for-an-excuse-to-explode hydrogen? So here we were in the middle of more empty space and burning gas than the human mind could even begin to gander at and when you had a little moon dust instead of marrow in your bones, you knew a little better what it was when not one living breathing thing, not a stone, not one airy masked kachina gave a goddamn what desert you disappear into, what vacuum freeze-dried you, left you gasping for fatherly love, left you stranded where there was not a single voice to speak your name, it was all the goddamn same to the ground you wound up stuck in.

After Logan’s father died, his father’s brother–a brother he couldn’t have been more unlike–was always over the house, reeking of the void some part of him must have dropped out of. Always with the excuse of checking up on them. Anything I can do to help?

Drive your truck off a cliff, Logan thought, that’d be a help.

There got to be long good-byes, the screen door creaking as his mother started to close it, but then opening again because Cal thought of something else to say. Cal started coming over for dinner straight from the garage where he worked. He would sit next to Cal for an awkward minute or two. Cal would turn and say something to him, How’s school today, maybe. He would keep his hands on his thighs and say, ‘Pretty good.’ He would try not to sit too close because when Cal opened his mouth to talk, he got a whiff of something sweet as rotting fruit, sour as old blood. Maybe cigarettes had done that. Maybe, secretly, Cal had been eating those scraped-out parts he was supposed to have thrown away. Whatever it had been, it had made Logan think of dead animals–not the kind Cal brought home, but the kind he came across every now and then along the side of the road, flies buzzing around, looking for a juicy place to breed before the sun turned the meat into leather.

He would leave the room while Cal sat there in front of the tv drinking beer, his eyes as still and concentrated as a snake’s. He was usually wearing a sleeveless t-shirt so you could see the skull grinning between a pair of outstretched wings tattooed on his left arm. Under the skull, as if the 1 were a straight leg and the 3 a curlicue of a leg, was the number 13. A dull tattoo that didn’t show up all that well on Cal’s dark skin. He’d been in the room one day when his mother asked him what he’d gotten it for. After death you take flight was all he said about the skull. Then he bent down and shoved an arm bumpy with muscles’like rocks under the skin–in Logan’s face. Anglos think thirteen’s unlucky. What the hell do they know? Grinning, he straightened up and the stoniness of his arm softened. The right arm had been done more professionally: a yellow-and-blue snake wrapped around a naked woman who didn’t seem to mind being coiled up like that. Logan never heard Cal say anything about that one.

He avoided Cal as much as possible. He hung from the monkey bars in the schoolyard or, down the street from his house, would invent a game he could play with a stick and a little dirt to dig around in. He got himself invited over to Manny’s house, or Ramon’s. The door to his room closed, he read books borrowed from the school library with his chin on his hands, his elbows on the floor and his crossed feet hovering over him as if they were the tip of a scorpion’s tail.

When he knew Cal wouldn’t be around, he played his mother’s piano. She had started him on it before he’d gotten out of kindergarten and every now and then, in her sweetest voice, she would still try to teach him something new. He would sit there a little stiffly and nod, then try it out on the keys. Yes, that’s it, you got it on the first try. Aren’t you proud of yourself? Why don’t you smile? You used to smile when you learned how to play something new.

When no one was home he took time to dust the piano’s dark wood. He kept the grooves clean with a cloth over his fingernail. Woodgrain patterns became familiar, if inhuman, faces frozen in odd expressions. The calm tension of the keys gave him a certain reassurance, as did knowing each sound that went with each key. He rarely walked past the piano without stopping to put his hand on the polished wood, lured by the mystery of music just beneath the smooth, jointed case. Something he could do Cal couldn’t. With his boy’s fingertips, he commanded sound. No matter that with one of his big hands Cal could squeeze his skull till it cracked, Cal would never have the gift of playing even three notes in a row with any kind of harmony. No matter the heaps of guts he made Logan scrape out of ribcages with his fingers, Logan could whistle for song any time he pleased and it would come running, tail wagging. He, too, was obeyed.

Sometimes Cal would come home while he was playing and for a moment, they would look at each other across a distance both of them knew would never be crossed. What showed up on Cal’s face most of the time might have been the look of a man vaguely aware he’d lost something but unable to remember what, leaving him with only a dull urge to get it back. Cal would lean against the doorless doorway between the living room and what was supposed to be a dining room, a beer in his hand, half in a world he could never leave, half in a world he could never completely enter, something making the white scar that split an eyebrow roughly down the middle a little paler. Logan would play for a few minutes, pretending he didn’t mind Cal in the room, watching. Then, without a word, he would close the wooden cover over the keys and go to his room.

Cal got to be around the house as often as not. Usually in the living room where there were no doors to close, no way to avoid Cal’s motionless stare. He would leave empty beer cans lying wherever he finished them. Logan’s mother would collect them after he was gone as if she needed money for the returns. He filled up ashtrays and wasn’t above a spill of beer to dowse a butt that kept burning after being stubbed. As if he couldn’t stand that little display of will, as if he wanted to make sure every bit of smoldering orange knew who was boss.

No matter how much his mother vacuumed, the living room grew as stale as smoke Cal had exhaled weeks ago. He was over so much that he began to sleep on that couch. A long one, a sort of tarnished gold like a spicy mustard, with cloth-covered cushions that soaked up sweat after he’d passed out there, spilled coffee, mishandled beer, gravy from a frozen dinner he’d forked into his mouth without taking his eyes off the tv. Did a fair job of hiding the stains, too. Cal moved in on that mustard gold couch and pretty soon it got to smell just like him.

Cal could sit on the couch with the tv on for an hour or more without moving, not even a twitch of his head. Part reptile maybe. Logan would wish he’d quietly died sitting straight up in the dark, only flickering tv light on him–weird things like that happen sometimes, the dead don’t always keel over. Unexpectedly, Cal would light a cigarette–as startling as a statue coming down off its pedestal’and that trivial movement would shake to pieces a whole daydream.

Two fingers (maybe his own, maybe his dead brother’s, maybe something no one but Cal would ever be able to name) were moving down from his breastbone and taking what was inside, what should never have seen light of day, and letting it soak into that couch. He’d drained away, there, had lost for good what could have made him a father to his nephew, a brother to his brother. As slowly as gray finding its way into a healthy headful of black. After a while, it looked likely that one day they’d bury Cal and that couch together.

At night, Logan would lie awake staring at the ceiling, at the Great Plains of the Dakotas, and he would think about how, as soon he was old enough, he would kill Cal. The Hopi were not a tribe of warriors; peace pretty much ran like an axis through them. But Logan had read that on the Great Plains, Crazy Horse had been a feared warrior by the time he was 17. By the time he was 17, Logan would take his father’s hunting knife, which he kept it in a secret place in his closet, and bury it in Cal’s chest.

Other times he would look up at the ceiling and see the deserts of Egypt’vaster, he had been sure, than any in Arizona. In the Pharaoh’s conquering army, he held the reins of a chariot. One day he would request permission from the Pharaoh to face Cal in single combat and the other soldiers encircling them would form the arena. They would swing their swords at one another like gladiators until Cal’s blood had run into the sand and he claimed victory in the name of his Pharaoh.

He would get on a boat, proud of what he had done and stand at the prow, watching the Nile flow under him, his robes snapping in the wind while slaves rowed to the throb of a drum. The ship would take him out to sea, the sea to colder lands where he would be a Viking. A dark Viking who was outcast because of his color, but who walked freely, without challenge, because he had killed his uncle with his sword when he was only 17. Or maybe with his hunting knife.

Then Cal stopped sleeping on the couch.

He had slept less because he knew where Cal was. He would hear them at night sometimes, mostly his mother’s harsh whispering, usually what Cal said back because Cal had always been loud. Hell I won’t. He got to learn to act like a man. B’sides, he ain’t gonna start payin’ the bills around here is ‘ee? We’re goin t’Kansas and that thing’s too goddamn big t’take. His mother’s voice had been an urgent hiss. He’d known they were arguing, but he hadn’t been able to make out over what.

We all got to make sacrifices. I made ‘em all my life. I didn’t have no tv in my house. Shit, I lived on a goddamn reservation. I’ll send the little bastard up there, that’ll make him act grateful. He wouldn’t have nothin if it wasn’t for me.

The argument ended with a slap. Logan shivered in his bed, a tingling gathering behind his groin, and he knew that he would have wet his bed if Cal came in his room then. When he heard Cal’s big footsteps going past, he pretended to be asleep. A door slammed and he knew he was safe for the night. But it took a long time before he fell asleep.

He prayed, in those days, to be older, to grow up with the broad shoulders his father had had, to have a head that brushed doorways, to be able to palm a cement block in his hand. Cal had been wide enough, had hydraulics in him sturdy enough that Logan once saw him maneuver a refrigerator onto his back and then carry it up two flights of stairs. Logan didn’t care. Every time he looked at Cal he wished he were 17. By then, he figured, he would be grown enough to manhandle Cal the same way Cal had manhandled that fridge. He thought about it at dinner when Cal asked for the salt. He thought about it on holidays when everybody was forcing a smile and trying to be friendly.

Two days before they’d moved to Kansas, his mother had been watching for him on his way home from school; he’d caught her looking out the window just before the curtain fell back. When he got to the living room, he stopped. He hadn’t thought about stopping, his body had just pulled up short, like he’d run into a couch he somehow hadn’t noticed had been stood on end, or a glass door so clean he hadn’t realized it was there. He felt his face drop, too, without any permission from him. There was an empty space where the piano had been, a gaping hole growing wider while he stood there blinking. His mother had her hand over her mouth, the rest of her face taut around her hand, her narrow eyes nearly closed, trembling while she’d held the rest of her face still. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, the panes in hers were shivering as if they were about to shatter. Even with her hand over her mouth, Logan had been amazed there was no sound.