American Masculine Read Free Page A

change. If he could find a real woman he’d do well by her. The children they had would sleep like bears, and wake powerful in the world.
    He’d never find that woman.
    Driving, he checked himself. What did he know, really? I don’t know anything, he thought, about anyone. Even knowing himself seemed like a joke. He’d just keep driving to AA like he had for some time, good meeting in the conference room of an old hotel on Twenty-seventh up toward the airport, precise regimen, daily. He’d had other women. He thought of them sometimes. He tried not to think of Sadie. He’d been training his mind to quit doubting, quit tempting darkness. If he tried he could reach past the self-loathing, find a way to hold her and himself in a good light, perhaps the whole world in a good light. His sponsor had him practicing most nights on the drive home. Forget about her, they all said, everyone in the group. He was healthy now. Good job. No drugs. No booze. Still, she unraveled him.
    Often, as he drove, his hands went wet as rain and he imagined himself as a young boy entering a strange house in the Heights. As if in a dream, he saw his mother standing before him gripped about the neck by a large white man and forced to watch as an ugly white woman approached her. The white woman will be brutal to her, he thought. She will beat her. Then a name would come to him, it was his mother’s name, or a name given to her, Little Bird, and he couldn’t remember how she received this name, and as soon as he remembered the name the dream changed and it was only him with his mother and he held her head and kissed her cheek and said kind words to her.
    When he thought right his hands didn’t sweat. He knew then he’d gotten past the fear because his mind opened up and his face felt more together, not so loose. Driving, he’d picture himself in the last evening of summer, in a modest home outside Lame Deer. He saw a woman, but always, her head was turned. They’d be lying down in a large bed, him watching her sleep, her artistic body and fine lines; a real woman, and he a real man, and there in the waking dream he saw himself clearly. He walked alone in the fields of her loveliness and he beckoned her and she turned and still he could not quite make out her face, but it was not weary, and in her eyes was a promise and he saw that her look was gracious and the touch of her hand was meant for him, and he felt his burdens fall away, the weight of his failings become as nothing.
Nehmehohtahts,
he whispered in Cheyenne, I love you—and in the warmth of their bed in the half-world between sleep and morning he reached to caress the elusive nature of her ways and into her presence she welcomed him, and the words from her lips came softly in the darkness.
    I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with loving-kindness.
    At night in his bed he fell asleep and dreamed, and hoped he wouldn’t wake.
    HE WOKE in daylight to the sound of a phone ringing, a slight sound he hardly heard from the other room, and he rose and walked down the hall, seven years sober, seven single. On the phone, quiet, came Sadie’s voice. We borrow dignity, Benjamin thought, or we borrow disgrace. She was calling from a phone booth on the corner of First and North Thirtieth down by Montana Avenue. He made himself ready. He wore his best shirt.
    They hadn’t spoken since she left. He didn’t know where she’d gone.
    He drove to find her and they went together and sat in a booth at Frank’s Diner near the river and she told him she’d moved back with her mother in Minnesota, said she’d been sober three years, seven months, seven days. Her work as a dental hygienist had been consistent and good. She didn’t contact him because she didn’t trust herself.
    “And if I said I’m with someone else?” he said.
    His eyes burned into her. She looked to the window. “I’d be happy for you,” she said. “And sad for me.” She turned to him again. She