keeps on writing.

This is a project I am working on that might even turn into a novel. If you have the stamina to get through it, let me know what you think.

Chapter one: Buffalo Tears

Tom waited in the cab of the truck, languishing in the heat. The strands of hair that escaped from his long plait clung to the sides of his russet, sweaty face. His palms were covered in the grime of a day’s worth of working cattle. He had helped his father, a shorter, stockier version of himself, prod the remaining cows into their pens. Then had come the buffalo. He hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near them when it was time to bring them in. So he waited. When he was a child his grandmother had told him the story of a man who had been gored by a buffalo. The buffalo caught the man with its horn in the pit of his stomach and ripped up to his rib cage. He imagined that the man did not suffer long. He died quickly, taking deep, gulping breaths, but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back in his head with only the whites showing and they didn’t close when he died. Tom shuddered at the thought and turned on the radio. A fuzzy, Mexican station came through and he switched it off. He lay down on the cracked leather seat, resting his ever-growing legs out the driver’s side window and played with the end of his braid. He whistled the Bonanza theme song to himself, missing notes, and forgetting the tune halfway through. The moment he started drifting off to sleep he felt a sudden push on his feet. “Son, it’s time to go.”

“Sorry, Dad.” Tom sat up quickly, slid to the middle seat, and let his older brother Sam in the other side. Soon he was in between his dad and his brother. They drove in silence. The tepid breeze blowing through the open windows did nothing to ease his discomfort, but he sat still, watching the road ahead. They had an hour’s drive back to Tuba City. About five miles from their home, a dilapidated tavern appeared on the horizon and his father veered towards it and stopped outside while dust billowed out from under the tires from the abrupt halt. Tom felt heavy inside. He knew that his father would be stopping here today; they had been paid and his father wanted to unwind. His mother had begged him that morning to keep his father away from the tavern, but Tom knew there was nothing he could do to stop him.

“I won’t be long,” his father said abruptly and hopped out of the truck, followed by Sam.

“Sam!” Tom called out to him. He turned around and cocked his head to the side.

“What do you want, little brother?”

“Are you going to watch after dad?”

“I’m going to get a drink myself. We’ll be fine.” His lanky body loomed in the approaching dusk, his shadow reaching far behind him. He turned back to Tom and tossed his hair back over his shoulder and then crammed his hands into his back pockets. “Just wait here. We won’t be more than an hour or so. And don’t take the truck anywhere, okay?”

Tom remained in the middle seat, buckled in. He didn’t answer his brother. He couldn’t decide if he should go home without them or wait. It had happened too many times before and each time he waited. He didn’t want to see his father and brother get in the car drunk again and grip the dashboard while his father drove home, riding mostly in the middle of the road. It used to be easier when Sam was with him waiting, but Sam had started joining his father regularly at the bar that year. It was clear he was underage, but they were on the reservation, and the barman was a close friend so he made an exception for him. Tom knew he couldn’t stand another one of those drunken nights. He wanted to go home and see his father hug his mother. He wanted to feel like everything was alright. He watched the sun waver low on the horizon in the heat of the peach-stained sky. It was almost twilight. The ruckus from the bar could be heard outside—clinking bottles, rowdy laughter, whiny country music, and cracking pool balls. A thought crossed his mind. Take the keys. They wouldn’t be able to drive home. They would have to call for his mother to pick them up. Maybe that would make his father think a little more about what he was doing to his family. He reached for the keys in the ignition and then pulled his hand away. If he took them, his brother would be very angry. He left them dangling there. The keychain had a miniature horseshoe on it and a pair of dice with holes drilled in them. The dice were yellowed with age and dirt. Tom watched them as they swung there and impulsively reached out and grabbed them. He unbuckled, hopped out of the truck quickly, slammed the door, and started home, walking on the dry, weedy patch in the center of the dirt road.

A little less than an hour later he was home. It was almost dark. His mother was not home yet from work. He sat in front of the TV and watched episode after episode of some show packed with smiling white kids in high school until he couldn’t look at their phony faces any longer. When he heard tires on the driveway, he went upstairs. His mother was getting dropped off today by her co-worker, Verna. They always came inside together and made coffee so they could chat together for hours. They sat at the table talking for a while until Tom’s mother called him down. “Tom! Can you come in here?”

“Yeah, I’m coming.” He took his time marking his place in his book and rolling off the bed. He slowed at the entrance of the kitchen, “what do you want?” he asked cautiously.

“I want to see you. Come in here, hon.”

He looked around the corner and saw them at the dinette table. The brown Formica surface was chipped in a couple places at the edges. There were two cups of coffee on the table in handmade, pottery mugs. No steam was rising from them. His mother’s hands rested near her cup; they were small and weathered, but still had nicely shaped fingernails. He loved that about her. Her hands were beautiful. She used to scratch his back until he fell asleep when he was a child. Her index finger traced the rim of her cup, over and over. He could tell she was uneasy.

“What’s up, Mom?”

“Come here, give me a hug.” She extended her arms out and caught him by the sleeve, pulling him in and hugging him around the waist. He was much taller than her, especially when she was sitting. She scratched his lower back lightly. “Did your dad come home?” She already knew the answer.

“Nuh uh. He’s at the bar. Sam stayed too.” He tried to keep his words to a minimum, but he didn’t feel the need to lie. It didn’t work anymore. There was nothing left to cover up. He didn’t want to stay to see his mother’s face fall, so he wriggled out of her grasp and went back upstairs to his books. They were his refuge. He could read about anything he wanted and almost feel far away from all the sadness and disappointment that permeated their small, government house.

That night he dreamed his father was gored by a buffalo. The sun was high above them as they worked in the corral, trying to coerce a colossal black buffalo into its pen. Its body was clearly too wide to fit through the gate. His father boldly approached the buffalo’s looming, shaggy body and began to push on the right flank. As he pushed, his feet left shallow trenches in the dry earth and the buffalo stood rigid, not moving even an inch. Dust clouded around his ankles. He continued to push. The dust reached his waist; his boots were no longer visible. Tom was too afraid to approach. He stood back, shielding his eyes from the sun. He could barely see his father any longer through the dust. In a blur of dark movement, the buffalo swung around the right side and disrupted the cloud his father was gathering. It was like lightning striking through a thunderhead. The buffalo struck with its left horn. It ripped through his father’s flannel shirt, through his white undershirt, and into his soft underbelly. As the buffalo drew its head upward, it seemed deliberately slow. It watched Tom with its eye, rimmed in red, and snorted with a final effort, pulling its horn up and out, and shaking its head as it finished. His father fell to the ground with a deadened thud, flat onto his torn belly. The buffalo raced around the perimeter of the corral, looking for an exit, and spied Tom gazing in shock at his father and the puddle of blood spreading out from underneath his body. He raced forward trying to separate Tom from the body, but Tom flung himself on top of his father’s bulk and buried his face in the dank hollow of his neck. He tensed his body, waiting for the buffalo to attack, and screamed for his dad, although he knew it was useless. He felt his body shaking but wasn’t sure if it was coming from him.

Tom’s eyes zoomed back into the dark around him as hand on his back was shaking him awake. He realized he was clenching the sides of his pillow over his ears; his eyes were damp. He didn’t remember crying. His mother turned him over, her face seemed distorted; tracks of wetness ran down her cheeks, the whites of her eyes were almost entirely pink. She looked like a smaller, sad version of the buffalo. “I’ve been trying to wake you up for a while. Tom…are you… okay?” She started sobbing into a corner of the sheets. Then she looked into his eyes for a long time trying to focus on him, but tears kept filling up her eyes and blurring him out.

“What’s going on? Tell me!” He practically shouted, sitting up to face her. He grabbed his mom’s arms and felt her weight shift forward. She teetered on the edge of his bed and almost fell onto him. “Tom. He’s gone. He’s gone.” She gasped and started coughing deeply, as if she’d swallowed too many tears. Tom reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Mom, I took the keys. He’s fine. He’s probably still at the bar.” He pulled the keys out from under his mattress and showed her in a desperate attempt to prove her wrong, but he felt his lower lip stretching down as he grimaced, trying not to cry in front of her.

“Honey…Vince gave him a ride home. They got in an accident.” She hung her head and cupped her face with her hands.

“No.” Tom started crying too, covering his eyes with his fists.

“He lived. So did Sam. But your father…didn’t.” The last word came out with renewed sobbing. He couldn’t speak. He turned back to himself and let his face sink down into the pillow. He cried while his mom held his back and shoulders close to her chest, pinning his arms under hers. He stayed that way until he couldn’t feel them any longer. He didn’t remember falling asleep again, wrapped in his mother’s arms, but soon he was facing the buffalo again in his dreams.

Tom woke up again before dawn. His mother was not holding him any longer, she had left him. The room felt unbearably empty. He looked out the window at the lightening sky and wondered if he had dreamed his father’s death. He looked at the front of his thin, 1996 Four Corners Powwow t-shirt and saw the mascara stains his mother left on him. Reality hit him again. He crumpled into a ball beneath his sheets, the pain of death squeezing his lungs until he felt like he couldn’t inhale. He sobbed on exhales, his chest tightening with every lunge, until his eyes were dry and there were no tears left. His face burned, rubbed raw by his damp shirt sleeve. Continuing to wipe his dry face, he got off of his bed to walk around his room mindlessly. After a few minutes he paused to look at a picture of himself and his father on a fishing trip and he pounded his chest with his fist to shake a cry loose. The empty feeling only worsened. It seemed to him like his life had a chunk taken out of it, the kind of gaping hole left by a backhoe when it lifts out tons of dirt and leaves behind long toothy gashes in the earth. His heart hurt. He didn’t know that was even possible. How could it literally hurt with every beat? He imagined what it looked like inside his bony chest—the blood splattered on its spongy inner walls with every beat, but it was never absorbed. It sloshed around, growing darker, pooling, until it grew black and his heart burst from the excess blood, covering his organs with a dark coating like the stomach on the Pepto-Bismol commercial.

It was only 5:17, but he couldn’t stay in his room any longer waiting to find out what his part would be in this tragedy. It was already here and he needed to know. He had taken the keys. The memories running through his head were spaced with incessant “whys.” Why did his father go to the bar? Why did he take the keys? Why didn’t his brother help? Why did he get a ride home from that good-for-nothing drunk, Vince? Why did he have to die? Why didn’t he stay? Why was he such a bad son? Why was he so stupid? He felt responsible. He knew that if he’d just stayed like he was supposed to, he could have at least helped his father watch the road. He made him get a ride with someone else. It was stupid, so stupid! Why did he do it?! These thoughts wound themselves around his brain until they left room for no others. All he knew was it was his fault. He opened the bedroom door and checked his mother’s room. She wasn’t there. He panicked. When he walked into the living room, he saw his grandmother’s salt and pepper head resting on the back of the couch and he went up to her. Seeing that she was still asleep, he sat down next to her carefully, breathless sobs still escaping his compressed lungs, and put his head on her bent shoulder to wait for his blame.

Somehow he fell asleep again and stayed that way for a couple more hours. When he awoke, he smelled fry bread. His grandmother, Shima, was in the kitchen making a large batch to get them through the dawning, woe-filled day. He buried his head in the couch cushions, and imagining he smelled his father’s scent there, immediately snapped his head up and stared out the window. His father’s white truck was still missing from the driveway. He imagined going back to get it and he wanted to vomit. Everything was different now. Wrong. Empty. Strange. It was a mistake, but it was my mistake, he thought over and over again. What could be done? Nothing. He could not imagine an alternate reality in which his father did not exist. Yet he was in it. He could not see any solutions to the problem that faced his family. He imagined them trying to exist each day, but eventually the sorrow would shatter them.

“Thomas.” His grandmother said, placing a floury hand on his shoulder. “Come eat. I know you probably aren’t hungry, but try.”

He stood up obediently, walked over to the table, and sat down in front of a stack of fry bread and a glass of warm Pepsi. He did not want it. The Pepsi hit his stomach and contracted it to the size of a walnut. He bit into the bread and swallowed a large chunk. The thick, glutinous mass strained at the sides of his stomach. But he ate. He said nothing; it was as if each moment he re-awoke to the reality of his existence. And he was shocked each time it happened.

“I know what you are thinking. Please don’t blame yourself.”

He looked at his grandmother with narrowed, fearful eyes and ripped off a piece of fry bread with his teeth. “Do you know what I’m thinking?!” He said, still chewing. His anger was apparent in his voice.

“You are not the first person to experience the death of someone they love. I lost your grandfather more than ten years ago. I lost my first child. I lost my own parents even before you were born. Don’t tell me I don’t understand, because I do.” Her voice remained soft as she recalled each of the painful memories she’d unearthed with her words. “You did not make him die, Thomas.”

“Don’t you know what happened, Grandma?! I took the keys. I left him stranded at the bar. On purpose! He couldn’t get home because of me! Vince gave him a ride. Stupid drunk! He died because of me!” His tears ran out against his will, down his cheeks, and over his lips and chin. He swallowed them unwillingly.

“You did not make your father do anything. You will understand someday that death is not a punishment, it is part of life.” She set another piece of bread in front of him and he looked at it with disgust. “Thomas, I love you. You can talk to me about it when you’re ready, okay?” She left whitened handprints on his cheek and shoulder, kissed his head, and walked back into the kitchen. He saw her start to knead the dough again with her arthritic fingers. He wondered how she could remain so calm. He was angry at her because she didn’t seem upset about it. How could she take it so lightly? Just one more? Or was it just her son-in-law? Maybe she never loved him. But he knew that wasn’t true either. Death just didn’t seem like what everyone said it was. His grandmother said it was simply a part of life. But he felt like he died inside along with his father. He sat for the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon on the sofa under a ragged afghan, his favorite from childhood, disregarding the warmth of the day. He would sweat one moment and shiver the next. His thoughts did not allow him to sleep again for the rest of the day, no matter how hard he tried to escape the situation. He was completely exhausted. The fry bread and Pepsi came up and hour after he ate it and his stomach churned in its absence.

When his mother pulled up in the truck that afternoon with his brother Sam, back from the hospital, Tom didn’t know whether to be happy to see him or to be upset with him. Sam had a part in this too. The rusted whiteness of the Toyota seemed purer in the burning sunlight. Maybe it was trying to be holier than it really was to honor its past owner.

As soon as Sam came in the door, Tom glared at him. He huddled on the couch, not wanting to fling accusations at his frail-looking body. Sam’s arm was in a sling; his face had numerous cuts on it, butterflied shut with tiny white pieces of tape. He looked guilty and worn. The two brothers continued to exchange glances as their mother escorted Sam into the room by his shoulders. She reached to smooth his hair and make him sit in an armchair like an invalid. “Sam, just sit here. Grandma will get you something to eat.”

“Thanks mom,” he murmured. Turning to Tom he looked like he wanted to explain, but Tom immediately looked at the ground and waved his hand in front of his face.

“I don’t want to hear a thing from you, Sam. I just don’t.”

“I won’t say a thing then. Damnit! I just don’t know what to do.” He got up and went into the kitchen, grabbed a Coors out of the fridge and went out the back door.

“Sam! Bring that back in here!” His mother called after him, but didn’t follow.

Tom could hear the sound of a basketball hitting the pavement. Sam stayed out back shooting baskets one-handed until it got too dark to see the rim clearly.

When he came in for dinner, they all sat around the table chewing pensively. Occasionally Tom’s mother would let out a tiny gasp and dab her eye with a napkin. The large stack of fry bread never seemed to diminish as they picked at it. Their chili cooled and coagulated. No one ate much. Tom stood up with his bowl in hand, ready to exit to his room when his mother stopped him. “Sit down. We all need to talk about some things.”

“Can’t it wait, mom?” Sam put down his fork noisily with his left hand.

“No. We need to decide a couple of things. Everything is different now…” Tears dripped from the corners of her eyes and flowed down the well-worn paths they had traveled all day long.

“Mom. You aren’t ready to talk about this. And I don’t want to talk about it either, okay?” Tom said without making eye contact.

“Why does everything have to be so damn hard?!” She shoved her bowl aside, knocking it off the table and letting it shatter without even reacting to the sound. “I can’t be here anymore. Not here. Not where he was. I won’t be able to live longer than a week.”

“What are you talking about?” Tom said, looking up from his full bowl of chili. “We can’t go anywhere else. There is nowhere else.”

“Mom, I’m sorry it all happened, okay? Is that what you’ve wanted to hear from me all day? Sorry. I’m a bad son. In fact, I’m worse than him. I’m the one that put him in the car with Vince when he was too drunk to walk. It’s my own fault!” Sam started crying for the first time since he got home.

Tom didn’t know what to say. He was too sore inside from it all. His guilt choked him and he let Sam blame it on himself. But he knew it was nobody’s fault but his own and he watched them sob in agony, trying to make sense of what had happened.

* * *

The next week the Navajo Hopi Observer ran an obituary that Tom wrote and submitted himself:

SANI LAMEBULL—Tuba City, AZ. Died 23 August, 2002. Born on 12 November, 1964, he was only 37 years old when he passed away. He was a loving husband and father. Sani is survived by his two sons, Samuel and Thomas Lamebull, and his wife Tansy Lamebull. Services for Sani Lamebull will be held on Thursday August 28 at 5:00 p.m. in the Desert Memorial Funeral Home. He will be greatly missed.

* * *

Every day seemed the same for a long time. Each morning when they awoke, the stinging reality of loss was renewed. It was as if they could not recover from the shock. At the funeral they cried with their family and friends, said how much they would miss him, and knew that their words would never match the pain they felt. It was only a shadow of the beast that had taken over their lives. The buffalo continued to haunt Tom in his dreams. Each night his family was attacked. He saw them torn apart over and over. He walked about each day feeling as if his insides were torn and they would not heal.

At the beginning of September, Tom’s mother started collecting boxes. She announced they would be leaving the reservation—at least for a while until she could recover. To Tom it felt like he was being uprooted again and the hole in his heart grew deeper. She found a job in Toquerville, Utah at a factory. They loaded all the boxes into the back of the truck, lashed them down with bungee cords, and started off down the dusty road. Shima would live in their house as it was government property anyway and they couldn’t sell it. No one would rent it either. Tuba city wasn’t exactly expanding.

Tom sat between his mother and Sam in the truck. They drove for more than six hours across Arizona and into Utah. He couldn’t see out the back window at the road trailing behind. He kept glancing into the rear view mirror and instead of a long stretch of yellow double lines in the desert landscape, he saw brown cardboard marked with handwritten labels in thin, shaky sharpie lines like “dishes”, “Tom’s stuff”, “bedroom”, and so on. They left the boxes with his father’s things in the basement of their house. There were only two boxes, each the size of an average television. They held most of his worn clothing, boots, hats, and some personal items. He had kept all of his most treasured objects in his sock drawer. Before they left, Tom had taken a pocket knife, some old coins, and a photo of his father as a teenager, fancydancing at a powwow, from that cache. He also took a couple smaller flannel shirts that would fit him. He kept these things in his backpack at his feet. His thoughts condensed in the cramped cab of the truck and he switched on the radio to let them out.

“Turn that off. I hate that Mexican radio stuff.” Sam poked his head out of the window and spit his gum into the red sand.

Tom switched the radio to a country song on the only other clear station. The song was about a man who had left a message on his own answering machine for his lost love. Somehow it won her back. Tom couldn’t help thinking how completely ludicrous that story sounded, but he continued to listen, wincing at the yellow butterflies that hit the windshield in swarms.

They drove down the main street at dusk; Toquerville was even smaller than Tuba City. Sam groaned and hung his head and arms out the window, folding his body in half as if he were going to be sick. Tom just stared ahead, feeling like he was receiving his punishment for what he’d done. He reached up and fingered his braid, rubbing the brush-like tip across his jaw line, back and forth.