Buckskin Cocaine Read online

  “I know I have to go,” he said, “but just remember Olivia, these things don’t come around all the time.”

  I leaned over and kissed him and watched him walk down the stairs, get into his car. I finished my cigarette and started a new one. It was my turn to look out into the night. The stars were bright. I looked up and into them, and into everything I’d promised myself. I didn’t understand why Tomás was so anxious, so young. Why he wanted so much from me, when he’d really just started to get to know me. I liked him but I knew that I wouldn’t let anyone stop me from going to New York. And I couldn’t imagine him going with me. He clearly liked it here, clearly wanted to stay near his mother. Normally, I would have found that creepy, but she was wonderful. I wanted to stay with my dad too. But I knew that there was so much ahead of me, and there wasn’t anything else I really loved, besides dance. I didn’t want to do anything else, and I was good, very good. I could be something that other people couldn’t. All of this filled me with sadness, with confusion, and when I finished my second cigarette, I went to sleep with images of my father, of Tomás, and of a future moving through my head like a cloud of bright blue cosmic dust.

  “DON’T YOU CONDESCEND TO ME, YOU…”

  “What. You what? You think you’re so strong Olivia, but you are still a little girl who thinks every man is her daddy.”

  I ran up to him then, and he took my wiry yellow arms in his hands and crushed them to his chest. I pulled them free and walked into our bedroom. Things had gotten bad. David kept telling me that I was getting older, and that he was impatient for me to settle down, to start a studio in New York. But I was twenty-six and I knew that my career could not be over, that I could keep touring now that I was too old to be what I had been in New York for a few brief years. I knew that what David wanted was a wife.

  I sat down on our bed and David followed. He sat down next to me and I felt like jumping out the window to get away from him.

  “Olivia, I love you. But you can’t expect me to wait forever. And you can’t be that impervious.”

  I continued my silence, looked to my favorite painting. I had told David that it was my favorite. He said that the painting often made him sad. When I asked him why he kept it in his bedroom, he told me that he supposed he liked to keep things that made him sad close to him. I had rolled my eyes.

  “Olivia, this silent treatment, it is like what a child does. You are only proving my point,” he said, getting up and standing in front of me. “And it is time to grow up, stop pretending you are so tough. And soon you will be too old to tour even. You already are. And you are not that tough, and I’m sick of this, what is that stupid word, ghetto-routine.”

  I looked up at him in anger and then away.

  He sighed deeply. “We should start dinner. I’m hungry. We can talk more about this later.” He began to walk out of the bedroom door. I stopped him.

  “You have no idea what I’ve been through. What I’m capable of,” I said and something in my tone made David pause.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I love to dance. I gave up everything to dance. That is something you can never understand. Your mother danced, you grew up with money. You grew up with everyone applauding your every artistic move. I gave up everything, everything. And so don’t you tell me that I have to stop dancing before I’m ready. I’m still young. I have until thirty and not a goddamn thing will stop me from eeking every bit of beauty out of my life before that part of it is over. And you can wait.”

  David was silent. His steely blue-grey eyes looking at me, into me, his hands listless at his sides. “I don’t think that’s what you really want Olivia. I’ve seen your softness.”

  I laughed then, hard and David began to shake his head.

  “You want to know how hard I am? Remember Rome? Remember when I asked you if you wanted children and you told me that there was plenty of time? I was pregnant then David. You idiot. And I got rid of it.”

  The look of horror on David’s face was something that I hadn’t expected.

  “You…you whore.”

  Tremendous satisfaction rolled all the way through me, like a wave. “Yes, that’s right. I’m a whore, every woman’s a whore.”

  “No, just you. Just you are a whore,” David said, turning and walking out.

  I sat on the bed for a long time, listening to David cry in the kitchen, feeling like something evil, like something that had emerged out of a cave. A great black and silver thing, not of this world. Something born on another planet, maybe Mars. I saw myself in this cave, living off of my own pain and anger and I didn’t care. David was weak, they were all so weak. I felt a tightness in my chest and stomach that would never unwind, it was a part of my creatureness, a part of my evil and it fed me. I was something born without a mother.

  MY ROOMMATE WAS OUT WHEN I GOT THE CALL. It was one of my aunties, and she was crying. I looked out of the window of my apartment. The sun was shining. It was almost always shining in New Mexico. There were birds, and they were talking. I felt faint. I sat down to listen to her say it in her lilting Oklahoma accent.

  “Have to go,” I said faintly, dropping the phone and not bothering to put it on the hook. I could hear my auntie calling my name in the background, but it felt like I had suddenly been sunk under thousands of miles of ocean, like I was suddenly upside down, and as I made my way to the toilet, lurching from side to side like a broken toy, I began to tear at my arms and wail, and I vomited on the floor before I could even get to the bathroom.

  An hour later, after I had gotten the pint of cheap vodka out of the kitchen, and crawled into bed with it, my roommate came in, though I didn’t hear her until she got to the bedroom.

  “Olivia, are you crying?” She asked. I looked at her, trying to answer. “There’s vomit on the floor and the phone was off the hook, what’s…oh, oh God, it’s your father isn’t it? Oh, God.” She went to me and held me as I shook and cried. She pet my hair and tried to take the vodka from me. After some time, she got up and I could hear her cleaning the floor. Could hear her in the kitchen. She came in with soup and I shook my head.

  “Olivia, you must eat. And I’m taking the vodka. Have some water, too,” she said, and I let her take the vodka. I had been crying for so long, I had begun to go numb. And then it would start all over again, the pain.

  I took the glass of water out of her hand, and then the soup and let her pet my head while I ate and drank, though it felt like my throat was closing up with every bit of liquid I tried to force down. She took my hand and led me to the living room and turned on the TV. She wrapped me in a blanket, my daddy’s Pendleton that he’d given me when I went away to college, and let me cry, and then finally sleep.

  Daddy had been at the hospital, mopping the floors, when a man had come in. They hadn’t seen the gun. When he pulled it out, as they began to wheel him towards surgery, people screamed and daddy dropped his mop and walked over to see what was going on, to see if he could help. Daddy was always one to help. He was well liked on the job. The man began waving the gun, and it went off.

  My roommate called Dancing Earth, my studio, and told them what had happened, and they were very sympathetic. I took two weeks, during which time I went home for Daddy’s funeral. They were going to bury him in Oklahoma, in Ada, where he’d been born. I wondered if my mother would show up, but nobody knew where she was, and though I looked around for a woman who looked like me at the funeral, a tall light-skinned woman standing on a little yellow hill, dressed in black, there was no one like that, and I went home soon after.

  For a long time, I merely functioned. Days would go by and I’d realize that I had lost my sense of time completely. My roommate had to make me eat, and I grew thinner than I’d ever been. If she wasn’t there to make me, I just didn’t. That tightness in my throat was always there, and I was putting off going back to Denver to get daddy’s things. I knew that I needed to, that the landlord had put things in storage for me, but that it was ridiculou
s to continue to pay the rent for storage for furniture I didn’t need. I just couldn’t stand the idea of going through his things, of throwing his whole, tiny life away. He had been all I’d really had. The last time I’d visited him, he looked tired. His hair was white. He’d asked me why I wouldn’t move home, and I’d told him that there were more opportunities in Albuquerque, but that was a half-truth. Coming home would be admitting my final defeat. When I told David that I’d gotten rid of our child, he became listless, uncaring. I had moved out soon after, to live with a number of dancers like when I’d first moved to New York and I’d continued to tour. But he had ultimately been right. A few years after that, the gigs began to dry up, and the idea of staying in New York, that city that had held so much magic for me once, was too much to bear, and I had packed my things and moved to Albuquerque. I entered the graduate program in dance there and completed it easily.

  It took a long time before I was ready to go back up to Denver, go through daddy’s things. I had decided, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, that I would never go back. I had returned to work a few weeks after his death but the months that had passed since had been so bad that I felt like I was looking at things through a badly lighted tunnel most days.

  I had booked a Motel 6 near the storage unit. I planned on getting it all done in a few days, and taking back what I could with me in my little car. The rest would be donated to the thrift store, the same thrift store daddy and I had loved to shop in on Saturdays.

  The drive took around seven hours, hours in which I cried, played music, thought about how angry I was that daddy’s life had been taken so brutally, in a way that had no meaning. I had wanted daddy to see me really grow up, turn my life around, and right before daddy had been shot, I thought perhaps I was finally on the brink of that. I was thirty-two. Things had begun to shift inside me, I had been cutting out the booze, the weeping, the stupid boys. I had been thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. When I had been young, all I could think about was making it as a dancer. It was as if I thought I would die after I couldn’t dance anymore. When David would talk about having children, owning a studio, making a life, all I could feel was irritation, as if he didn’t care about me, only what I could do for him. And something else; a deep feeling inside me that he was not the one I wanted to do those things with.

  I pulled up to the Motel around 5:00, parked, checked in and went to the Denny’s across the way. I wanted to go to the Denver Diner, but I was tired, and I knew it would make me too sad. I didn’t like showing any emotion in public. I didn’t like showing emotion.

  The Denny’s was busy with the dinner crowd, children crying and squealing, squirming in their seats, throwing their food. I ate my salad mechanically, the world around me alternately speeding up and then slowing down. I looked at the faces of the parents. Often, those faces were very tired. The mother’s especially. It was as if they were there only to serve their children’s needs. Often, the dads would only insert themselves if there was noise. Otherwise, they seemed content to let their wives deal with everything else. I paid my ticket and left.

  I thought I would have trouble sleeping, as there had been many sleepless nights in the past few months, but I drifted off easily, after setting my copy of Vanity Fair on the nightstand.

  The next day was bright, and I sighed as I sat up. After my shower, I went again to the Denny’s and ordered a cinnamon roll and coffee. I had a sweet tooth. I had gotten that from daddy. I drove over to the unit, talked to the man, whose look of pity made me almost tearful, and we walked over to daddy’s tiny unit.

  “The landlord was nice. He threw away some trash for you,” the man said. He was an old, scruffy looking white guy, and he smelled like sour beer, the kind of smell you sweat out after a night of drinking.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Going through the unit was hard. There was really so little. It was all about going through boxes and finding the things that were valuable to me personally. But it was also the little things: the erasers, the scraps of paper, the buttons we’d gotten at Denver March that said “I’m Indian and I Vote!” the tiny bits and pieces of his life that I knew had to be thrown away, but with every tiny thing he had squirreled away in a drawer somewhere that ended up in one of the giant sacks I’d brought for the dumpster, I felt like I was tossing his life away, who he had been further into the abyss.

  I broke for lunch, which was a handful of almonds I’d brought with me. I sat on the couch that daddy and I had sat on so many times watching TV. Daddy liked comedies. He liked to laugh, and his laugh always made me feel better, closer to the earth, more human. Even as a child I had felt the monster growing inside me, the thing that needed out, away, that thing that people loved but didn’t like.

  As the light began to die, I looked over at the small sea of boxes. I was almost done. I had found some of my things, and a few of daddy’s that I wanted to keep. Some items that I wanted to send to relatives. I had brought a few boxes with me and had packed them in. There was only one box to go, and tomorrow morning a truck from the thrift store was scheduled to come. I would be gone by then.

  I opened the last box and sifted through loads of paper, mainly drawings I’d done when I was a child, notes I’d left for him, papers I recognized from the drawers of my dresser. I put most of it in the trash, keeping a piece or two. I’d almost reached the bottom of the box, when I found something with Tomás’ name on it and froze. I put the paper in my bag and threw the rest of the papers in the box away, shut the storage unit door and went back to the hotel, my stomach grumbling. I sat in the hotel room, eating almonds mechanically and staring at the TV, even though I hadn’t turned it on.

  I pulled the heavy phone book out of the drawer of the nightstand and set it down in front of me on the bed. I opened it, and went through, looking under “T.” There it was. Tomás Trujillo. If it was him. My finger paused over his name and I began to feel nervous, strange. Why call now? After all these years. After what happened. I could always bring this number with me to Albuquerque, sit on it. After all, my life was about to change. I would be moving soon. Did I really need to be drudging the past up, after all that had happened?

  I dialed the number slowly, my long, skinny fingers pushing each button down as deliberately as possible. I laughed as the ringing began because I was treating this like it was a sacred act.

  “Hello?”

  “Tomás?”

  It was him. It was his voice. I was sure of it.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Olivia. Olivia James.”

  I thought it would take him a while to recognize me, but it didn’t.

  He laughed softly. “Olivia. I knew you’d call someday.”

  “Oh did you?” I said coyly, easily falling back into our old routine.

  “I did.”

  I started crying then.

  “Oh, Olivia, what’s wrong?”

  “My dad. He died.”

  “I’m so sorry Olivia. I understand. My dad died two years ago, and as much as he was an old angry coot, I was sad as hell. Can I do anything?”

  “No. No, thank you though. I just went through his storage unit. It was awful.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You still have your mom though?” I asked, wishing I could get up and get a tissue from the bathroom. I shifted around the bed uncomfortably and thought about all the times I’d talked to him while sitting on my bed. How lovely that had been.

  “Oh yes. She’s still around. And still a glamorous creature of untold depths.”

  I laughed. “Oh, Tomás, you…you sound like you.”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  I thought about asking him to get together for breakfast.

  “She just loves the kids. Though when we try to stick her with babysitting, she informs us that she’s more than a babysitter,” he said, laughing again.

  It was as if he’d blown ice into me, through the phone. “Oh, you have kids? How many?” I aske
d, hoping I sounded normal. But I felt sick. I suppose there was a part of me that had been hoping…

  “Two. And a dog and three cats. My wife’s really into cats. She’s like the neighborhood cat lady, though she’s married and doesn’t smell like cat piss.”

  I tried to laugh but all that came out of my mouth was an awkward choking noise.

  “So, how long are you in town for? Would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow night? My wife’s a terrible cook, but I’m not. My mother made sure I knew how to make every Peruvian dish in existence I think, much to my father’s chagrin.”

  “Oh, maybe next time. I have to get back. I live in Albuquerque now,” I said.

  “Yeah. I know,” he said, and his voice was strange.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Well, do you have to get back to work, or could you call in? I’d love to see you,” he said.

  “I have to get back because actually, well, I’m moving to Chicago.”

  “Chicago?”

  “Yes. I have my master’s now. And, well, I’m too old to be a professional. I’ve wandered around enough and, well, I applied to some universities and I’m going to be a teacher at a university there. Tenure-track.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said, though he sounded sad.

  “So, I’m exhausted,” I said. “I really have to sleep.”

  “Sure, sure…but, Olivia, let’s keep in touch, OK? Please call again.”

  “Of course,” I said, and hung up.

  “I’M EIGHTEEN! I’m not going to settle down, are you insane?” I screamed.

  We were in the parking lot. We had just graduated, and I was late for a dinner with my dad at the Denver Diner.

  “Olivia, I love you! And I’ve accepted that you’re going to New York. All I’m saying is that I want to be with you, that I want to wait. I can wait, Olivia.”

  I put my hand on the door handle. “I’m late.”