Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson Read Free Book Online

also regards me with a confusion that’s only another clue, among many I can’t understand, as to the truth of my presence and past. Helping her is the Indian woman Gayla. Minnie tends to send her out of the kitchen when I’m around. These Virginians don’t like the idea of mixing up white and colored before a boy’s old enough to understand there’s a difference. Gayla’s fairly light, actually. She lives on the outskirts of my father’s land with some of the other Indians. It isn’t her real name, her real name is something unpronounceable. She grew up with an Indian mother and sister out in Oklahoma, the white father having disappeared no later than he first showed up, and she came to Pennsylvania around the same time her sister named Rae married a white newspaperman near Chicago. Like a lot of Indians or half-breeds, Gayla could be any age at all.
    As always when I go into the living room, the talk between my mother and my brothers seems to stop a little, and then they go on as before, adjusting to the interjection of my bigness into all their little coziness. The tree is bright. It’s green and silver. A fire roars in the hearth. I sort of shove my way into the festivities. Sometimes I say something and usually Alice will ask me what I mean by it. I could say the most routine thing and Alice acts like I’m talking in runes. “Nice fire,” I might say, and Alice’s face goes still and she finally answers, “Well Banning, I’m not really sure what you intended by that remark.” Actually, it’ll turn out to be a pretty funny remark at that. But all I know at this moment is that I’m a kid who wants to be a part of Christmas here and I can’t seem to get in. Whatever little breach of family bonds is left open for me to enter, I don’t fit through, and there I am outside, in the middle of the living room. Henry has a little set he got for Christmas, with a fort and men, and after a while when Oral gets bored with it Henry relents out of need for another player: he’s Santa Ana with ten thousand troops and I’m a hundred and fifty Texans defending the mission. I’m big enough that I just reach across the battlefield and my arm wipes out six or seven of Henry’s battalions. “You jackass,” he shrieks, “ you’re supposed to die! All of you is supposed to die!” Henry packs up the set and goes back to talking with Oral and Alice. I head upstairs to my bedroom; on the way I knock over this or that of Alice’s bric-a-brac, reducing the Old World to rubble. A chair or a tablelamp. “For God’s sake,” Oral says scornfully. Henry shakes his head with contempt. Alice sighs, deep and wounded. Out with the fucking chair anyway, I say back, though not to them, or to anyone who can hear me for years to come.

23
    I GET TO THE top of the stairs, the smoke of Christmas fire and smell of food wafting up after me, and lumber down the hall and crash through my bedroom door. I knock a few more things over and sit in the dark of my bedroom awhile. I don’t remember if I cry. Well yes I do remember. But I sit still awhile and soon I forget about it. I sit in the middle of the room in the dark and look out the nine windows of my bedroom. Some I look through more than others. Later I’ll realize just how few windows all the other rooms of the world have. I can’t get over how only my bedroom has just the right number of windows. It’s possible of course that I just can’t take a hint. It’s possible they’ve put me in such a room with all these windows for a reason. The better to hurl myself out one of them. But instead I just take in everything I see from them. In one I see the year of my birth and in one I see the year of my death, though I see neither my birth nor my death precisely. In the seven windows in between I see the seventy or so years that are my time. Not my life but my time.
    And I’m sitting there and I hear this sound. It’s the sound of my time. I’d expect it to be a roar, like