Beyond Deserving Read Online Free PDF Page B

whoop. He was Blackfeet, raised a long way from the sea. They threw stories back and forth. One was about another Indian, a Crow named Charlie-Bird-in-Ground. He had had his balls cut off and stuffed in his mouth, in a whorehouse in Saigon. “That was the war,” Fisher and Jake said. They talked about it like pranks remembered from high school. Good old Charlie No-Balls.
    There was a picture of Jake on the wall of his houseboat. He was wearing a headband made from torn black pajamas, and he was holding a submachine gun. His hair hung long and silky, as if he had had a shower and then put back on his dirty clothes. He looked a lot more Indian in the photograph than he did now. He was standing on a sampan. He had a smart-ass expression that didn’t much resemble him now; except when he was drunk, he was soft-spoken, and never looked at you straight on. But he must have had some of those feelings still, or he must have remembered them, or wanted them, because there was the picture. And there was a Montana Indian on a houseboat in Sausalito.
    Fisher studied the picture a moment and named a place: Can Tho or Ham Lo. Katie couldn’t make it out. “Right,” Jake, a.k.a. Kneebone, laughed. “When we got through, there wasn’t a leaf left on a bush. We shaved the fucking shoreline, man.” Fisher laughed too. “Three hundred junks a day. All mine were little guys with nets, scared shitless. You got all the cargo.” Jake flicked the picture with his fingernail. “I could smell Charlie in their fish sauce.”
    â€œGod, Fish,” Katie whispered when they were in their sleeping bags, inches away from the couple’s bunk. “I don’t even know what you two are talking about, and it scares me. Even when it’s over now.” She could see Fisher’s face in the glare of lights from a nearby disco, bouncing off the window above her head. The look Fisher gave her was the look you’d give a cat on your lap just before you put it off. “Don’t try,” he told her. “It was boring, and wet, and hot. You couldn’t understand. Wait for the movie version.” His voice cracked, as if he were talking over a radio. Across a paddy, maybe, or around a bend.

8
    Fisher sweated all night, every night. He woke smelling sour and stale. All his shirts were wet in big circles under the arms. For a long time Katie changed the sheets every day, but it got to be too much. She lay on a dry place on her side of the bed. The cook at work said it sounded like diabetes. Katie nagged and nagged until Fisher went to see a doctor. He came home thoroughly peeved. The doctor learned that he was a carpenter, and he said, “Well, don’t laborers expect to sweat?” There hadn’t been a blood test. The cook said there should have been a glucose tolerance test. Ursula said Michael said his and Fisher’s dad had something, maybe it was diabetes. Katie wept in frustration. “Don’t you know? !” she yelled at Michael. Ursula shrugged. Michael wasn’t unlike Fisher in many ways, she said. Fisher wouldn’t discuss it, ever again.
    He dreamed. Sometimes he groaned, or cried out, in his sleep. It didn’t seem to wake him, only her. The dreams went on, year after year. She told him about them. “You should talk,” he said, “the way you twitch in your sleep.” He made an excuse of it, to take her from behind. “Go on, wiggle around and get your little ass in my face.” Clearly, he wasn’t going to discuss what was going on with him. She knew her own dreams drew from his, but she knew his were the real nightmares. The groans were too deep to ignore. She learned to sleep over them, like street noise, but she knew they were there, and she worried. The sweating didn’t go away, either. Sometimes, to prove to herself that she loved him, she drew close to him, her thighs recoiling as they touched the cool, clammy space