In the City of Shy Hunters by Tom Spanbauer Read Free Book Online Page B

arm.
    September 17, 1978. Five years ago.
    LOCAL MAN RECEIVES SCHOLARSHIP WAS THE HEADLINE IN THE Idaho State Journal. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM, NEW YORK CITY .
    POETRY .
    My forearms, the pain always starts in my forearms, up to my shoulders, splashes down through my heart, cattle prod to cock.
    Against the tobacco-yellow wall, the photo of Charlie was gray. My index touched the liar’s space in between his two front teeth, moved the line down the back of his head, touched the Idaho flag, the bundled ocelot skin. My index led my eyes off the photo, down to the window-frame, to the open window.
    Out on the fire escape, my bare feet against iron rods, my bare skin felt the breeze. I rolled a cigarette, lit the cigarette. Tiny orange illumination in the dark. To the horizon was tarred roofs and TV antennae and wooden water towers. The top of the Con Ed building poked up blue and white.
    My hands, white knuckles around the fire-escape railing, I leaned onto the railing. Below, through my feet, grids of iron, empty space all the way down.
    My breath in. My breath out.
    You could call this a prayer.
    Into the big smoggy dark loud Manhattan, I yelled, Charlie! Charlie 2Moons! I’m here! In New York City! I’ve come to find you! Just like we promised!
    There was a slight stirring of the wind. Below, between my feet, through the grids of iron, a paper cup rolled across the cement.
    Then a voice out of the dark yelled, Shut the fuck up!
    A big drag on the cigarette. In the night my shorts and T-shirt, my pink skin, glowing like Catholic statues.
    My next words I didn’t yell. I spoke them clearly, out loud but not loud, pointing their intent to the blue and white top of Con Ed.
    Please Charlie, I said, Forgive me. You got to forgive me. I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do.

CHAPTER
TWO
    A ugust 8, 1961, the day I met Charlie 2Moons, was the day after we moved from Hope, Idaho, to Fort Hall, Idaho—to the reservation.
    The reason we moved to the reservation, into the Residency, was because Mother lost a baby, a girl, and when she got home from the hospital, all she did was sit at the kitchen table, her hair sticking up all over, in her yellow terry-cloth bathrobe, staring at the red tulips on the tablecloth and drinking coffee and smoking Herbert Tareytons.
    Then one day, just like that, Mother wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t in her bedroom, wasn’t anywhere. None of her clothes or shoes were gone and we didn’t have a car. I thought the Door of the Dead had opened up for sure.
    Bobbie said I got all sweaty and feverish and she had to sit on Mother’s bed with me and hold a cold washrag to my forehead.
    That night, Father got home late, with his bottle of Crown Royal. Bobbie told him Mother was gone, and Father slammed his fist down on the table.
    That woman’s gone looking for her baby girl. She’s going to break! Father said.
    Father didn’t go looking for Mother until morning. Then he saddled up his horse and rode out. He found mother, barefoot, in her yellow terry-cloth bathrobe out in the straw field.
    After that, it was a regular thing. Mother kept running out into the field. So Father figured we needed a change, that we’d better move, but Mother said we didn’t have any money, we’d never have any money to move to a respectable brick home with a fireplace and picture window, and she was right because all my father did was work on the rodeo circuit—bronc riding mostly, steer wrestling, rodeo clown.
    Father made a deal to be the caretaker for the red-brick building with the fireplace and the picture windows with this one tribal council guy,Lou Racing, who Father drank with. Father caretaking and fifty bucks a month in rent got us the brick house.
    The house was brick but there were no picture windows, and the windows that were there had bars on them.
    The house had been empty since the war. Nobody wanted to live there. No white people wanted