All My Relations Read Online Free PDF

want you there,” Milton said. “You don’t have the right feelings.” He left before dawn and hadn’t returned to Helene when C.C. replied.
    â€œI was shocked to hear about Audrey,” C.C. wrote. “I feel sad about it every day. Hashan is such a bad place. But it isn’t any better here. At Allen’s school there are gangs and not just Mexicans but black and white too.”
    She wrote again: “I miss you. I’ve been thinking about coming back. Allen says he won’t but he’ll come with me in the end. The money has helped. Thank you.”
    Milton threw up his arms and danced on the corral dirt, still moist and reddened from fluke autumn rains. Shouting, he danced on one leg and the other, dipping from side to side as if soaring, his head whirling. Oldenburg’s nagging—where will they live?—worried him little. Over dinner Oldenburg suggested, “They’ll live in your old place, and you can visit them on weekends. We’ll have to move our baking to the middle of the week.”
    Milton knew he must be with the
O’odham
. Announcing a ride into the mountains, he saddled up and galloped toward Hashan. Because he couldn’t see the faces of his family, his joy felt weirdly rootless. The past year he had killed them inside. The sudden aches for Allen, the sensation of carrying C.C.’s weight in his arms, had been like the twinges of heat, cold, and pain from his missing finger. As if straining after their elusive faces, Milton rode faster. His straw hat, blown back and held by its cord, flapped at his ear. The horse’s neck was soaked with sweat.
    Bosque’s fat wife said he wasn’t home. Milton made a plan for the Sundowner: after one draft for sociability, he would play the shuffleboard game. Tying up at a light pole, he hesitated in the lounge doorway. The familiarity of the raw wood beams crisscrossing the bare Sheetrock walls frightened him. But Bosque, sliding his rear off a barstool, called, “Milton Oldenburg.”
    â€œC.C.’s hauling her little tail home,” Milton announced. “And the boy.”
    â€œAll riiight.” Bosque pumped his hand up and down. Milton’s embarrassment at his missing finger disappeared in the vastnessof Bosque’s grip. Friends he hadn’t spoken to in months surrounded him. “When’s she coming? She going to live on the ranch? Oldenburg will have a whole Indian family now.” Warmed by their celebration of his good luck, Milton ordered pitchers. His glass of draft was deep gold and sweeter than he had remembered, though flat. Others treated him in return. Someone told a story of Bosque building a scrap wood raft to sail the shallow lake left by the rains. Halfway across, the raft had broken apart and sunk. “Bosque was all mud up to his eyes,” the storyteller said. “He looked like a bull rolling in cow flop.” Everyone laughed.
    Fuzzy after a half dozen beers, Milton felt his heart pound, and his blood. He saw them then—C.C., wings of hair, white teeth, dimpled round cheeks. Allen’s straight bangs and small, unsmiling mouth. Their eyes were black with ripples of light, reflections on a pool. Milton was drawn into that pool, lost. Terror washed over him like a cold liquid, and he ordered a vodka.
    â€œI’m a drunk,” he told the neighbor on his right.
    â€œCould be. Let’s check that out, Milton,” the man said.
    â€œI never worked.”
    â€œNo way,” the man said, shaking his head.
    â€œI didn’t make a living for them.”
    â€œNot even a little bitty bit,” the man agreed.
    â€œNot even this much,” Milton said, holding his thumb and forefinger almost closed, momentarily diverted by the game. “I hurt them.”
    Holding up his hands, the man yelled, “Not me.”
    â€œI tortured them. They don’t belong to me. I don’t have a family,” Milton mumbled.