The Absence of Angels

  The Absence of Angels

  W. S. Penn

  New York

  For Jennifer

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to Patricia Hilden and Timothy Reiss for their endless encouragement, and to the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Michigan Council on the Arts for their generous support of the completion of this novel.

  “All Indian time has a vertical dimension that cups past and future in a timeless present that forgets no injustices and anticipates all possible compensations.”

  —Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi

  “He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.”

  —Sitting Bull

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.

  Death made Himself familiar to me at birth, travelling by wagon, dressed in Eastern cloth and a hardhat with a little light on the forehead.

  “It’s as if some people can’t see where they’re going,” Grandfather laughed.

  Death had made the journey to the City of Angels to guard the body of a newborn child in its crib. The baby was His, but Death couldn’t get into the crib to take me. The crib was in an oxygen tent, and no one but the doctors who poked and prodded the baby and then stood with the elk’s head necklaces hanging from their necks consulting each other’s ignorance was allowed to reach into the tent. So Death waited patiently, and watched. At moments, He would go out into the waiting room and sit beside father, who seemed to be reading his hands like some ancient text; or He would slip into the maternity ward and stroke the belly of mother, who knew from the conspiracy of silence that her baby was not well. Death couldn’t help but smile when the doctors told father that the child would not live.

  As Death waited, Grandfather made the journey from Chosposi Mesa to the city. In his then new 1947 Plymouth, he made the fifteen-hour trip in eleven hours, never going above fifty miles per hour.

  “It’s not a matter of how fast you drive,” he would say to explain how he did it. “It’s a matter of concentration.”

  Without much imagination, I could picture him virtually motionless behind the steering wheel, his gray eyes focused on the horizon, concentrating on reaching the white space between the hills and the blue sky, the big wheels of the Plymouth gobbling up an extra yard for every yard they rolled over.

  No one believed him, yet all he said was, “When you drive as far as the eye can see, you have to see farther.”

  So Grandfather arrived at the hospital, the first time he had ever been in a hospital. Father says he said little. Only went to the isolated crib in its plastic tent and observed the form of the baby who was, as he said years later, green: “Blue from no oxygen. Yellow from jaundice.” The baby’s fists, which no one had seemed to notice, were clenched tight as though they grasped a key, and it was the fists that seemed to satisfy Grandfather.

  “The baby will live,” he told father, who was rapidly making extravagant promises to the God who tries to make all other gods unnecessary, and when he can’t do that, enters a cosmic mitosis and calls himself the Trinity.

  Then Grandfather took a disappointed Death by the wrist, put Him in the passenger seat of the 1947 Plymouth, concentrated on the grayness as far away as his eyes could see, and arrived at Chosposi eleven hours later.

  To Laura P., the Hopi woman he had married, he said, “The boy has it and won’t let go.”

  Laura P., who lived with Grandfather with a contention which could be mistaken for bitterness but was really a kind of boundless love, understood. She knew that Death had returned with Grandfather.

  “The child of the mission is sickly,” she said.

  Grandfather simply nodded and, without taking off his cap, walked Death to the mission, where he left Him chained like a rabid dog beside the mission door.

  Possibly, you could deduce that Grandfather had just invented entropy for himself. But I doubt that Grandfather thought it through. He understood that for every child Death misses He finds a replacement. Besides, he had seen the mission child’s hands, and they were loose and flabby, the fingers like baby Gilas, wiggling and mean. And he didn’t particularly wish to have Death hang around his own door. As he said, “Death is so boring.” And he meant that, boring. Grandfather wasn’t frightened of Death. Death was an uninteresting companion. So, rather than wait, rather than make up some strange moral complication, he walked Death to the mission and left Him. Five days later, the once childless missionary was childless again, and when Grandfather passed the building on his way to the trading post he retrieved the broken chain to take home and repair, in case he would need it again.

  Every birthday, with religious devotion, father told me the rest. After Death was gone and the distant lament of the missionary’s wife awakened me, I lay untouched by human hands staring out at the world through the translucent plastic of an oxygen tent. Other babies bubbled in their own tents with limp gloves welded into the sides like hands without bones. Some of them were so small that their little arms looked like flippers and fins; others had huge heads that, without hair, looked like relief maps with cliffs for foreheads; some of them looked just plain sickly. None of them were my hue of green and to father that made me special.

  Small gaggles of medical men gathered about the tent, peering in with curious worried faces before they shrugged and left. Women in stark stiff white seemed to float among the tents on a cushion of air. Cassocked figures wearing surplices and silver crosses slipped in on neutered feet to stand over the sickliest-looking babies, waving their hands in the air above the tents as though trying to shoo the flies off food.

  The weeks that passed were all the same and the only change seemed to be in the looks on the faces that peered down into my tipi like archangels. For the most part, I was content to sleep. When I did look up at the doctors wearing ponderous faces and elk’s head necklaces, I wondered how it happened that they didn’t know what Grandfather had known and I raised my little fists, shaking them to show that I had a good hold on it and that it was life. The doctors were too busy consulting one another’s ignorance and wondering what to tell mother to pay attention.

  When at last mother was strong enough to come in, I tried to wave at her to reassure her, but with my fists clenched, it must have seemed more like a threat than a promise. Mother, with her soft brown curls and hazel eyes distorted by the plastic of the tent, looked pretty funny and I laughed for the first time in my life. I must have looked equally funny to her, except she didn’t laugh. Rather, she stared down into my tipi as though I were a pet that she had taken for a long and arduous walk only to come home and have me misbehave in the house. Sliding her hand into one of the gloves in the side of the tent, she felt and poked me with fingers that felt like dry ice. Her voice sounded like tinsnips. Each time she came into the room, I hoped that she would take me out with her the way some of the other babies had been wheeled out, followed by the men in cassocks waving their hands and tossing fingers of water at the tents. But time after time she left me behind and I had to be content to rub the knuckles of my fists together or to box with the surgical hands hanging from the sides of the tent.

  2.

  Mother often claimed that I slept through anything. When I wasn’t sleeping, she swaddled me in blankets, covering my face with a crocheted blanket so I could breathe through the holes.

  “Hidden,” Elanna told me.

  “Disguised,” Pamela said.

  “You were,” Elanna liked to say later, “one ugly baby,” reminding me how, weighing 10.5 pounds at birth, I had grown large and thick with an aboriginal brow.

  “It was one ugly world,” Pamela insisted. “And oh did
we love you.”

  “Yes,” Elanna agreed. “We loved you.”

  Four and five years older respectively, Elanna and Pamela would run home from school and pull the blankets off my face and stare adoringly at me. Medium-sized with large bones like Laura P., Pamela’s round face was open, her almond eyes expressionless. Elanna had the same high cheekbones Pamela had, but her face was thinner, her bones smaller. When I raised my fists up toward them and said everything I knew how to say, Elanna’s adoring eyes narrowed and she smiled as though I were proof that she was smart. On weekends, they liked to wheel my carriage through Park La Brea to the tar pits, where Elanna scared Pamela by telling her how the tar trapped dinosaurs. If nosy parkers peeked beneath my blankets, they defended me angrily and Elanna would embarrass them into calling me cute, her fierce little body shaking with as much rage as Pamela’s shook with fear of strangers. I loved them both, adored the softness of Pamela and loved the sharpness of Elanna, and I never minded their calling me “Gargantua.” They helped me understand that a few pounds at birth made a large difference and that giving birth to a 10.5 pound bundle of green was not an experience any woman would look forward to with joy. The closest I could come to mother’s experience was to imagine being constipated for nine months and then taking a humongous dump only to discover that it looked like a baby newt. The closest mother ever came to what I felt as that newt was about three feet. She certainly seemed joyless as she told us stories of Indians raping white women or as she performed her ritual of Sani-Flush to avoid getting pregnant again. With the same lack of joy, she finally gave up and stopped swaddling me in blankets. I must have been about four.

  “Thank you, mother,” I said, free at last.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied.

  3.

  The salmon-colored stucco buildings of the school hunched across the street, our house one of the humble tract houses implanted around the huge asphalt playground. Out of these houses drifted words like spick and nigger and mackerel snapper, pinko and red. The high chain-link fence with galvanized barbs kept the words out of school on weekends, but on weekdays some of them sneaked through the gates hidden like lice in the unwashed hair of the other children.

  On their lips, too, my name, Albert Hummingbird, was transmuted into “Turdbird,” “Birdturd,” “Horseturd,” and later to just plain “Shithead.” I made treaty after treaty with them, only to learn that the secret nature of a treaty was to be broken.

  “It happens, if it happens at all, that way,” Grandfather said. “If you’re a Negro or Mexican, an Indian, a Jew. If you’re a proto-adult in the City of Angels and your Grandfather’s name is Hummingbird.”

  Tommy A. (the parthenogen of Tom Frederic A. the Third, real estate broker, V.P. of the Los Angeles River Club, and a St. Luke’s D.O.A. of a stroke on 5 November 1976) took to serenading me: “Hummingbird, Bummingbird.”

  “Cumbum,” he hissed, as he strolled past, holding hands with Marily Avi.

  I drew myself up as tall as possible. I sucked in my belly, hoping it would add to my height. I gave him a severe squinting look. “I wish you would leave me alone,” I said.

  Tommy grinned. “You wish,” he spat. “You wish.”

  He spit at the ground and his saliva struck my sneaker. He pushed me on the shoulder as I stared at the spittle dribbling off my shoe. His saliva was thicker, more viscous than most boys’. In a spitting contest, he would surpass all the competition. Tommy A., it seemed to me, was born to win, and when he raised his fist and shook it, I walked away.

  For the next few months, as we lined up in pairs after recess, Tommy spit on my shoes. I tried everything. I tried to ignore his spit. I tried asking him not to do that. I asked him why he wanted to do that. I warned him.

  One afternoon, I had a brilliant idea. “An Indian,” Grandfather said, “never kills rattlesnakes because he knows rattlesnakes want to meet up with him less than he wants to meet up with snakes. Given the chance, unless his mate is trapped behind the brave, the rattler will uncoil and slip away. All a human being has to do is remain very still and say, ‘Let us not meet again this year.’ Snakes understand that, and the human can go in peace.” I came to that.

  “Let us not meet again this year,” I said to Tommy. I said it just the way Grandfather had said it.

  “What?” Tommy sneered.

  “Let us not meet again this year,” I repeated, staring straight into his Scandinavian eyes, astonished at how blue they were.

  It worked!

  Well, not quite. When Tommy laughed, he didn’t know he was laughing at Grandfather’s words. He summoned a large lugey, hacking it up from the back of his throat. Against all of my training and all the instincts of my blood, I smashed my fist into his grinning, spitting face and then stood there stupidly, looking at the fist on the end of my arm, watching the blood begin to surface from the cut on my knuckle, wondering, in the midst of the commotion, where that fist had come from.

  “On the other hand,” Grandfather said. “White people are not rattlesnakes.” That night, I had bad dreams in which Grandfather’s oldest friend, Louis Applegate appeared, his face like a hatchet and his arm raised like a semaphore, pointing. The image stayed with me through the orange juice and carbon of one of mother’s breakfasts.

  The next day at school, the princi-pal gave me a lecture on problem solving in a socialized world. I failed to understand him. I felt as though he were drilling into the top of my skull and sifting sawdust into it. I kept myself to myself and concentrated on his adam’s apple.

  His bow-tie shimmered briefly, and then dissolved.

  I concentrated harder.

  By the time he decided on a “just” punishment for hitting Tommy, I’d made all but his voice disappear—the bow-tie, his swivel chair, the wall with its portrait of John Dewey behind him, the salmon stucco building of the school—and my eyes focused on the farthest gray line of the horizon.

  At recess, I made a pact with Tommy. “When you want to spit,” I said, “you tell me ahead of time and I will get out of the way.”

  After school, I served out my sentence, helping the janitor erase the blackboards and bang out the erasers, turning the yellow afternoon air white with dust. Marily Avi pursued me in her pert blue jumper and pink blouse.

  “Ail-burt,” she said, following me from room to room. “Oh, Ail-burt.”

  “Go away, Marily,” I said.

  “Oh, Ail-burt,” she sighed. “You’re so strong.”

  “Please?” I begged. The janitor’s daughter, Margaret Rocha and I could be matter-of-fact with each other, but Marily touched a nerve. I had to face up to it: When Margaret and I hid in closets with a flashlight and showed each other the essential difference between boys and girls, we felt scientific. But Margaret was not Marily, and Marily was not science. Still, when Marily cornered me in a cloakroom, I felt as though I was betraying Margaret.

  It didn’t stop me. I forgot everything, even Marily herself—except for her voice and the embarrassment I would always feel because she called it funny looking. I could think only of the white eraser dust floating away from my hands and dissolving into the heated air, until Marily pinched a little harder than she needed to.

  “There are two kinds of liar,” Grandfather warned that evening. “One forges all lies to fit the harness of the first lie. By the tenth lie, the pattern has all the appearance of fate. The other cares only that the lie is interesting or convincing (or both), and has done with it. He makes up new lies at will, as truth changes its chameleon colors or abandons its tail.”

  I had lied, but which kind of lie it was that I had made up about Marily Avi in the cloakroom, I didn’t know. It had been meant to cover up the humiliation I’d felt for running away from Marily and, since it neither looked like fate nor convinced Grandfather, I quickly abandoned it.

  On weekends, playing cowboys and Indians, I was assigned the role of Redskin. Even when for a change we played War the enemy was red and I was the enemy. I carried a peas
hooter while they used BB guns; Tommy’s was a pump action and I knew that if he ever hit me, it would hurt. Like Trickster Coyote I stalked them, able to remain motionless for extraordinary periods of time, sneaking around and through the alleys and dried-up river beds called washes, placing my toes down before my heels so any object that might make noise and give me away could be avoided.

  Tommy was the first to complain. “It’s not fair,” he said. “It’s not even realistic,” he added, feeling a historical necessity.

  At first, I refused to wear the pigeon feathers Tommy tied together so I could be spotted the way hunters spot a deer’s tail, but in the interests of peaceful play I finally conceded. The only time I wore those feathers, Tommy skipped a BB off my skull. For the rest of my life I’d have a white, bald scar just above the hairline to remind me.

  Saddened by the ease with which Tommy had broken the peace between us, I took to riding my bike around alone, wondering what Bernie Schneider was up to. I missed him.

  Bernie must have missed me, too.

  One day, as I rode my bicycle down the alley behind his house, he leapt out from behind some galvanized cans, causing me to swerve and run my knuckles along the cement block wall that bordered his backyard. Bloody, the bones of two knuckles gleaming white through the blood that spread out over the back of my hand, I let him lead me inside to his mother, who washed and poured peroxide over the knuckles as Bernie watched, unapologetic, tense, wanting, I dare say, to be the object of revenge.

  I didn’t feel vengeful. Instead, I focused on the fish heads floating in the vat on the stove, feeling something I had only associated with Grandfather’s house up to then, as the house and its smells seemed to close around me the way silence closes around the desert.

  “There,” Mrs. Schneider said. “Now sit and have some lemonade. Stay for dinner.”