:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
Some acts are like arrows in flight: they can never be called back and the harm they cause can never be undone. Such acts can change a man so that he can never look at himself in the same way again. It was just such an act that Tommy Rain Cloud Walking was contemplating in November as he stood behind the counter of Swann's Pharmacy down on Main Street dispensing life and comfort to the afflicted.
Tommy was planning to kill Daniel Two Bulls, to shoot him dead, even though this was an act that he knew would destroy him in this life and damn him in the next. He knew that to kill another Cheyenne was once considered to be the greatest possible evil among his people; it was an act so taboo that no word even existed for it in the Cheyenne language. He likewise knew that the Catholic church held that murder was a mortal sin. He believed both these judgments with his whole heart: there could be no forgiveness for what he was planning; he did not deserve forgiveness. No one would even think the fact that Daniel Two Bulls had slept with his wife was an extenuating circumstance, that this revenge would be an act of passion, since what had happened between Daniel and Lois was years ago, so long ago that Daniel himself might even have forgotten it.
To Tommy, though, who had just learned about it, what had happened was not years ago, it was not forgotten, and as for his forgiving Daniel--well, that was out of the question. When Father Tim at St. Rose's said in his last homily that we never partake so fully of the divine as when we extend forgiveness to those who have hurt or shamed us, it is true that Tommy felt a twinge of something that could have been guilt or remorse; it is also true that he looked up to Father Tim, who was a good and godly man. But all the same, Tommy thought he'd go on and be human for just a little while longer, another week or two, long enough at least to do the thing he was planning.
Lois had only just told him in October how he had been shamed twenty years past. He had felt his stomach drop like a plummeting bird when he realized where her talk was leading, and he himself had dropped into a chair with a heavy grunt of pain before she had finished what she had to say about Daniel.
"I'm sorry," she told him when she was done, and her face was thin and drawn, and tears filled her eyes. "I've grieved about it every day since it happened. I couldn't go without telling you. Without your forgiveness." He looked away from her to keep from meeting those shimmering eyes. The label on the medicine bottle at her bedside read "Dilaudid, 4 mg, As Needed for Pain," a drug and a dosage prescribed only for people in the last extremities, and he knew that by now her every moment was agony, but this was the first time he had seen her cry since the day Doctor Rosenthal in Oklahoma City had told her she was going to die.
When Lois had finished talking, she reached out her quavering hand for his, but he just sat there still and silent and kept looking away. All of this seemed like something happening to someone else. He could still remember how he had taken her to a college dance at Southwestern State and she had worn a blue dress and he had given her a pink corsage that had glowed against her brown shoulder. They had been so happy, laughing all the time in those first years, but she had grown so distant after they lost the baby. He had always thought that the distance was his fault; maybe it was.They should have grieved together, but he had his pharmacy classes and he read so slowly and those textbooks were so difficult, and he could not just drop his studies to tend to her. Life went on around them, despite them.
So he was not there for her, and she had found comfort with another, and of course it was Daniel Two Bulls, who had been comforting women round about, red and white, for the past twenty-five years.
A few days after she told him this truth, she passed on and it was too late; he had not told her that he forgave her or even that he loved her.
Now he never would.
Perhaps he would have silently nursed his grief and not plotted harm to anyone, but in the week after he laid Lois in the earth, Daniel Two Bulls came into the drug store to get his wife Sandra's prescription refilled--Procardia XL, hypertension pills, which had never surprised Tommy, since he had always thought that any woman married to Daniel would have to suffer at the very least from high blood pressure--and had heard Daniel say how sorry he was to hear about Lois. "She was a good woman," he said, nodding solemnly up at Tommy where he stood behind the counter. "I always liked her."
Jim Osbourne, the other pharmacist,echoed from wherever he was, back in the shelves, "A good woman." Oz was talkative enough when his smock was on, although if you met him in the street you'd be lucky to get two words out of him. Tommy himself merely grunted and tried to control the shaking of his hands as he poured pills from the large bottle onto the counter for counting. I always liked her. A grunt seemed the only possible response besides vaulting over the counter and attempting homicide right there in the drug store, and Daniel Two Bulls was still too large and vigorous a man for Tommy to believe his chances of taking revenge with his bare hands were favorable.
"You should come deer hunting with me in a couple of weeks," Daniel had gone on to say, not as surprising a transition as it might seem, since Daniel had been inviting Tommy to go hunting with him for years, ever since he became a pharmacist, in fact. "You know, I've been feeling a little under the weather lately," he went on, which might have been true. He did look tired; all that tom-catting around must take its toll, although word was he'd slowed down since Sandra had caught him in the act a few years back and put a bullet in his ass. "I'll bet some time in the open would do us both some good. Restore our spirits, you know. There aren't many things left we can do that are still like in the old days." And as Tommy willed his hands to unclench and type out the prescription label, Daniel had gone on from there as he always did to talk about the joys of hunting: the crisp fall air, your pulse racing as you first see your prey and then stalk it through the trees, the pressure of your finger against the trigger as you pull and the kick of the rifle against your shoulder, and suddenly, Tommy--without the tremor he feared might creep into his voice--said, "Okay, Daniel. I'll go with you."
Daniel looked up at him again. "Really?" he said. "You mean it? You hear that, Oz? Our medicine man says he'll go hunting with me." Jim Osbourne poked his head out from the shelves to mark the moment and join in his smile, and Daniel seemed so sincere in his enjoyment that Oz might have even thought he meant it.
But Tommy knew better. Medicine man. It was not that he had suddenly changed his mind about going hunting. It was just that he had understood for the first time how badly he wanted to see Daniel dead, and as Daniel stood there talking about hunting he had received an inspiration.
Only the day before he had been looking through an old Outdoor Oklahoma magazine while he sat at the soda fountain in back of the drug store eating his egg salad on wheat. He read that in 1994 there had been three fatal hunting accidents in Oklahoma, and that over the years, many hunters had been accidentally shot, usually by inexperienced hunting partners. It had meant nothing to him at the time, just something to read to while away his lunch break, but when he heard Daniel talking, it all came back to him. The day after he agreed to go deer hunting, Tommy went to the WalMart in El Reno and filled out the paperwork, and two weeks later, he brought home his new hunting rifle and ten boxes of shells. That Sunday, he was going to skip Mass and go somewhere to shoot at targets until he was certain that he could hit what he aimed at.
That was all that concerned him. He felt sure he could do the aiming when the time finally came.
Alice Graywolf, Lois' little sister, came into the drugstore dragging his nephew, little Clinton, who was scuffing his feet audibly as he reluctantly followed her to the pharmacy counter.
"Alice," Tommy said as she came up to him.
"Hey Alice," Oz called over. "What can we do you for?"
"I need to pick up some vitamins," she said, and turned her biggest smile on Tommy. "And I wanted to check on my brother-in-law. We haven't seen you."
Since the funeral, she meant, although she didn't say it. "I know. I've been busy."
Clinton scuffed over to the comic books and turned the metal rack with a screech. Alice spared him a look and turned back to Tommy. "We've been worried about you. Are you eating? You look thin. And tired." Alice and her neighbor Michelle Tilden had brought supper over the night before the funeral and when they'd found the kitchen sink piled high with weeks of dishes and the house a wreck, they'd shared a significant glance and then gone to washing up while he sat silently at the table poking at the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and strawberry cake they'd brought.
"I'm eating," he said. "I just don't sleep so well." That was God's truth. His stomach was all in knots and he felt like a coiled spring; he thought sometimes, This is how it must feel to go crazy. When he wasn't thinking about Daniel, he was thinking about Lois. He kept seeing her hand tremble towards his, trying to bridge the distance between them, the years; he kept remembering how he had turned away from her and her hand had wavered there in midair and then dropped back to her side.
If it pierced his heart like a knife just to think about it, what must it have done to her? He shook his head. "I think too much, I guess," he said quietly.
"That's true," Oz said from over his shoulder. "Never says much, but still waters run deep. His brain's ticking away in there like a fine-tuned engine."
Alice reached her hand up to the counter to touch Tommy's. "Come for dinner Sunday. We'll look for you after Mass."
He was about to shake his head, but then he had a thought. "What if I come out to your place and do some target practice in the morning and then stay for lunch?" She blinked at him. "Since when do you own a gun?"
"Tommy's going hunting with Daniel Two Bulls," Oz said. "Can you believe that?"
Alice smiled a wry little smile. "Good for you," she said. "It'll do you good to get out there and thrash around in the trees, even with that horny old brave."
"I just wanted to do some shooting before we go," Tommy said, shrugging one shoulder. "I've never been hunting."
Alice cocked her head to one side and thought for a moment. "We'll leave the gate key in the mailbox Sunday morning. You come back by the house about 1:00, you hear? Grandmother will be there, and you know she likes to eat on time."
He nodded. "Okay."
She bought a big bottle of Centrum, the best multi-vitamin they had--which wasn't saying much--and then dragged Clinton away from the comics and off in the direction of the front door. "See you boys."
The week started off cold and it dipped below freezing at night, but by Friday a warm snap had set in, and Sunday dawned clear and warmed up in a hurry. Tommy left for the Graywolfs' at nine and got there about nine-thirty. The last few miles were dirt, and a big oil field truck hurtled past him once, startling him; he drove in the floating dust for what seemed like minutes with his heart pounding and hands gripping the steering wheel. What if another truck came along while he was driving blind? All of this planning would be for nothing, and Daniel Two Bulls would get away unpunished.
But no other trucks came. He found the key, unlocked the gate, and drove the worn twin tracks across the pasture carefully so as not to high-center his Plymouth when the ruts got deep.
At the far fence, he stopped the car, took his rifle carefully out of its case, and, opening a box of shells, he slowly and methodically loaded the gun, the shells between his sure fingers like cold metallic pills.
He then crawled carefully through the barbed-wire fence. Michael Graywolf had told him to go down into the canyons. "It'll reduce the chance of your shooting my cows," he had said. "Besides it'll be sort of like what you'll find when you're hunting. Trees and all."
So Tommy climbed carefully down the side of a red sandstone slope, the rifle in one hand, his other hand ready to catch himself in case he slipped. For a moment he could catch a glimpse of the Canadian River valley, a few miles distant, and then he was down out of the wind and all he could see were the dusty red walls of the canyon and the narrow strip of blue sky overhead. The gun was strangely heavy in his hand, as if he were lugging far more than mere wood and metal. The gun made him feel anxious and powerful at the same time. It made him think that if he could simply master this magic without it destroying him, he could do anything. Guns were strong medicine.
As he followed along the banks of the stream farther into the canyon, the walls grew higher, trees began to sprout all around him, and the sun seemed a hot and distant thing. He could feel sweat trickling down his back. High above him, the wind blew--he knew it more from the movement of the dark green cedars atop the canyon walls than from any other information--but in the bottom where he was, the air was thick and still and there was no sound but the leaves crunching beneath his tennis shoes.
As he walked, he found himself growing attuned to the silence and trying to become a part of it, moving in short steps, choosing sure footholds, peering intently into the foliage and the shadows. He'd never much liked the outdoors and he'd lived in town his whole life long, but it did remind him of how when he was young he and his friends played war in a wooded vacant lot, how his heart had pounded as he crept from tree to tree, how he'd cradled a dirt clod in his hand for a surprise attack, and his lips curled upward slightly in the first smile to occupy his face for many weeks. Who'd have thought that forty years later he'd be sneaking through the woods preparing for another surprise attack? He imagined Daniel sliding forward, the hint of limp a singular reminder of his many transgressions; he imagined himself following, drawing closer, and raising the rifle to his shoulder.
Would it be better to shoot him before he turned around? Or would the sight of Daniel's suddenly-knowing face still those thoughts that rushed through his head every night?
Now there was a rustle of motion ahead, and Tommy almost dropped the rifle guiltily as though someone had heard his thoughts. The motion was accompanied by an agitated flapping sound, but he couldn't see for the undergrowth and the shadows.
Then Tommy caught a whiff of something greasy and sour, put that together with the motion and the flapping noise, and proceeded to move carefully forward, giving plenty of noisy advance warning, for he had also read in Outdoor Oklahoma that turkey buzzards could hurl as hideous projectile the rotting contents of their stomachs when startled or cornered. One bird, then another, looked up from its meal, then launched itself lazily upward into flight, leaving the source of the smell itself to be investigated.
It was a baby deer--a doe, he corrected himself. It had been dead for a while, and it had died violently. His first thought was that a mountain lion might have killed it, for when he had asked if there were any wild animals to watch out for, Michael had told him--without a trace of humor in his voice--that they'd found mountain lion tracks as big as his hand down by Whirlwind Creek.
Then he saw the bullet hole in the animal's neck and the matted blood in its coat and he realized that some poacher had mistaken this little doe for a trophy worth keeping, that there was no four-legged predator involved, and he relaxed a bit.
The animal's eyes were clouded, but they still seemed to look up at him meaningfully. Sorry about the stench, they might have been saying, or perhaps, What did you think happened when you shoot something?
That tightness had come back, the coiled-spring feeling, and his stomach was in knots, and it wasn't just because of the smell. "Stop looking at me," he heard himself saying, and he pulled back a step, as though distance might help.
A fly buzzed noisily around the deer's innards, and the buzzing cut into his brain like an band saw. Flashes of possible futures shot through his head. He saw Daniel Two Bulls lying there in front of him, his eyes open, a fly buzzing, the buzzards circling, the smell rising up to God and everyone; he saw clouded eyes looking up at him reproachfully.
He raised the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger for the first time, had to exert more pressure than he would have imagined, and the stock kicked hard against his shoulder like a blow from a fist and the deer's face disappeared in a spray of rotted flesh and splintered bone and the gunshot echoed through the canyon like the thunder at the end of the world.
He lowered the rifle and turned away and put a hand out to a tree to steady himself for a moment. He felt his stomach roiling and felt something bitter rise at the back of his throat, but he fought it down and stood tall and looked full on his destructive handiwork for a long time without moving.
"Good riddance," he said at last, and turned to walk back through the lengthening shadows.
He was decided.
On Tuesday of that week, Phillip One Horse came panting into the store to refill his prescription for Nicotrol, the nicotine patch. He had quit smoking at the behest of Carla Briggs, the girls basketball coach who was leaving to coach at Southwestern, and although Phillip's had gotten his old truck running, he had taken to jogging everywhere as a way to stay in shape, or, Tommy thought, as a way to keep up with Carla, who was a singularly healthy young lady.
"Oz," Phillip gasped, leaning over a little and putting his hands on his knees while he caught his breath; it was about five miles into town from his spread out near Roman Nose State Park. "Tommy."
"Afternoon, Phillip," Jim Osbourne said. "How you feeling?"
"Clean and sober," he said, after a bit, and he raised up. "Haven't had a drink in ten months, haven't smoked a cigarette in three. Now if I can just get over mint chocolate ice cream."
Tommy started filling Phillip's prescription. Against his better judgment, he had to admit that Phillip seemed to have turned his life around. As little as a year ago, he would have thought Phillip would never change, that he was still the same drunk Indian who had wound up doing time in the state pen. Maybe--just maybe--people could change.
"How's Carla?" Tommy heard himself asking. "We're going to miss her." Carla Briggs had led the Watonga girls to the playoffs three years in a row and now the program was likely to fall back to the same dismal level it had occupied before she came.
"I'm going to miss her myself," Phillip sighed.
"How are you guys going to manage seeing each other?" Oz asked.
"Well, we're talking about that," he said, and Tommy would almost have thought he was blushing. "Maybe we'll have to do something more permanent." He scooped up a handful of Bazooka bubble gum and placed it on the counter.
"That's great," Oz said, and he smiled broadly, genuinely. "Best thing that could ever happen to you. Right, Tommy?"
"Right," he said. Right. As long as you can keep watch over her night and day, as long as you don't lose your only chance at ever being a parent, as long as she doesn't die alone and in pain thinking you despise her. He turned away and let Oz finish up the paperwork.
That evening, after the store closed, Oz was taking off his smock and Tommy was neatly re-stacking the tiny boxes of Proventil inhalers.
"I'm ready to go," Oz said, brushing his hands free of symbolic dust. "You want to come for dinner?"
"I think I'll stick around for a while," Tommy said.
"Seems like you're spending a lot of time up here these days."
"Anything wrong with that?" He took down all the Intal inhalers and began re-stacking them.
"No," Oz said. "Just wondered if you'd like some company, that's all."
"Thanks," Tommy said, and he turned to Oz and nodded. "I'll be okay."
And so Oz left him there with the shelves and the medicines and the plastic bottles, which was okay with him. He liked the smell of the place, clean and sterile, and the look of the place, clinical and orderly. His house was dark and he couldn't seem to lift a hand to keep it in order. Dishes had stacked up in the sink again, and he had taken to simply heating up a Totino's pizza or Budget Gourmet dinner before he went to bed.
His thoughts in the dead of the night were disjointed, violent, and angry; he felt the rifle kick against his shoulder, heard the thunderclap of a gunshot like God's righteous anger, saw flesh and bone spray like a melon dropped from a great height. And when he finally found sleep, he dreamed shards of the same dream night after night: Father Tim's voice echoing through the dark deserted rectory, "Forgiveness, forgiveness"; Tommy rising to his feet and fleeing lead-limbed as if underwater down the aisle and into the arms of his Lois, worm-eaten and decaying, her eyes clouded but full of secret meaning; he felt her horrible hands grasping him, heard flies buzzing around her, smelled death and doom, and heard her intone with rotting tongue, "Forgiveness, forgiveness."
When he looked at himself in the mirror in the morning, his collar was too loose around his neck and he could see that the face he shaved was gaunt and exhausted. It was like he was wasting away, or, more truthfully, like he was being eaten up from inside, like his anger and pain were running wild like a cancer and taking him over.
He couldn't go on this way; it was killing him.
But then he caught a glimpse of his bed in the bedroom behind him and thought of Daniel and Lois together. They had dishonored him perhaps on that very bed where he now lay sleepless and tortured. That very bed. Something caught in his throat and he held the sink tightly with both hands. He saw them together, saw how beautiful and sad her face would have been as Daniel rutted away above her.
He thought of that same beautiful and sad face--wasted now with fear and anguish and disease--waiting patiently for him to turn and regard her with pity, and he groaned with the memory, with the futility, with the sheer pain of it, and he clenched his teeth and pulled his tie a little tighter to disguise his gapping collar and stared into his bloodshot eyes in the mirror.
He had no right to weaken now; if he could only hold together a little longer, then nothing else mattered.
Deer season started that very weekend.
He pushed himself away from the sink, drove off to the Hi-De-Ho café for his usual breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee, and then in to the pharmacy.
It was just after his lunch break that Daniel came into the store and made his way back toward the pharmacy, and Tommy, knowing that Oz was watching, smiled at him. Only a few more days.
"Is Sandra out of medicine already?" he asked, although what he ached to ask was "Do you know you're going to be dead in a few days? Do you know I'm going to put a bullet into your skull? Do you know I'm going to smile just like this when I pull the trigger?"
Daniel returned his smile, but it was not his usual foxy grin, and up close Tommy could see that his face seemed thin and drawn. "Nah," he said, waving a hand. "Sandra's fine."
He handed up a crumpled prescription, and Tommy accepted it from him, willing his hand to remain steady. He had to seem normal in front of Oz so he could tell others how friendly Tommy and Daniel had been when he last saw them together.
"I've been looking forward to going deer hunting," he said, smiling down at Daniel, and Daniel's face fell and his smile wavered once and then disappeared entirely.
"I'm not going to be able to go," he said. "Not unless you can work some strong medicine."
"Can't go," Tommy repeated, and his own face fell despite himself, and he saw Daniel standing in front of him and looking up almost like some kind of supplicant, and the images flew through his mind--the trees, the gunshot, the blood--and out of it.
Daniel was going to get away with it, to live happily to a ripe old age while he himself went home night after night to his dark house, to his sleepless nights in front of the TV watching infomercials, to his nightmare sleep. It was not to be tolerated; it was no life worth living. He might still find a use for that rifle.
"Let's see what we've got here," he managed to force out, picking up the prescription. The scribbling was doctorish, almost illegible, but Tommy had deciphered enough chicken-scratch over the years to make out the medication and dosage.
Dilaudid. 4 mg. As needed for pain.
His eyes flashed up from the paper to Daniel's unwavering gaze and then back down to the prescription.
"I guess my hunting days are over," Daniel was saying quietly, to which Oz was saying, "That's too bad. You know, Tommy bought a gun and everything."
But Tommy wasn't really listening. He was seeing another label, another gaunt face. He could see her hand reaching, her eyes imploring. He could see himself pulling away.
"I'm sorry you went to all that trouble," Daniel was telling him, and he forced himself to glance down at him. "I've been looking forward to it for a long time."
"Me too," he muttered. His hand tightened around the prescription and it crackled in his fist. "Waking and sleeping."
"I'm sorry we're not going to be able to go after all this time," Daniel said. "I feel bad."
Tommy thought again of that wavering arm reaching out to him. He thought of Father Tim. He thought of the doe. He thought of the pressure of his finger on the trigger and the dark shape of buzzards circling high in a blue sky. Daniel was still looking up at him, and his face was lined with care; he had lost weight. In that prescription, Tommy could see the end not far off, but he saw suddenly that there was still time for him to act.
He set that piece of paper--that death sentence--down on the counter softly, sacredly, looked Daniel right in the eyes, raised his right hand in what could have been equally a gesture to stop talking or a gesture of blessing, and waited.
"It's all right," Tommy said finally, when there was silence, and he took in a long deep breath. When he released it, something inside him seemed to come unstuck, uncoiled; something was liberated and released, and he found that, suddenly, unaccountably, he had tears in his eyes.
"It's all right, Daniel," he repeated, gruffly. "I forgive you." And with that, he turned away to do what good he could.