The Pale-Faced Lie Read online

  “And if we can’t detect a leak, an explosion will blast our dead asses clear to Mexico.”

  I always got a sick feeling in my stomach when Dad talked about explosions. The year before, the compressor station had blown up during a test run of some new turbines. Everyone still talked about it as though it had just happened.

  The morning had begun as usual, with Mom asleep on the couch, me in front of the TV watching cartoons, and Sam in the playpen. First came a rumbling noise, and then a loud boom rocked the house, making the pictures tumble off the walls. I ran to the window as the emergency siren pierced the still air and people scattered in all directions. Midnight went berserk, tearing through the room before climbing the curtains and hanging there, his hair standing on end.

  The second explosion shook the ground much harder than the first, knocking me down. Flames burst out of the station like giant orange balls, and smoke billowed high into the bright blue sky. The building disappeared behind a black cloud. When the siren erupted in another blast, the house shook again, and I had to put my hands over my ears. The buffalo farts smelled extra nasty, like they’d caught on fire.

  Mom sprang from the couch and ran around in circles, crying and shaking, as I huddled in the corner, afraid the ceiling would fall on us. Sam’s eyes darted back and forth between Mom and me before he scrunched up his face and started crying too. Lonnie was in school, so it was up to me to comfort Mom, but I didn’t know what to do when she dropped to the floor screaming. And the rumbling kept going on and on. Soon black smoke filled the house, and the air hung thick and heavy.

  I shook Mom a few times, but that didn’t help. It never did. She curled up into a ball, closed her eyes, and moaned. Then Mrs. Bell from next door burst into the living room. Her husband had worked the midnight shift and was home asleep when the station blew up.

  “Thelma Lou,” she said, “we don’t know what happened yet. Every spare man is there to help. Thurston is probably fine. Stay calm.”

  No one locked their doors in the compound—we were one big family. During an emergency, all the moms and dads helped out like they were relatives. Even people who avoided Mom came over to see what they could do.

  Mrs. Bell got down on the floor. “Thelma Lou, come on now, you have to get a hold of yourself.” She patted her back. “We’ll figure this out together.”

  Other neighbors streamed into the house and said nice things to Mom. Mrs. Bell helped her up to the couch and got her a glass of water. Mom shook so hard it spilled all over the floor. Dad said Mrs. Bell despised Mom, but she was kind that day, gently rubbing Mom’s shoulders and trying to get her to relax. She talked to Mom like she was a little kid, asking her if Lonnie was at school. Mom nodded, her sobs coming in such big spurts it was impossible to understand her.

  Finally the loud noises stopped, but the smoke and fiery clouds kept coming. Sam cried harder in the playpen, and one of the neighbors picked him up and rocked him, settling him down. He started up again a few minutes later when we heard the loud siren from a fire truck. I ran outside to see, and Midnight followed, diving under the neighbor’s bushes. Mrs. Bell yelled at me to get inside, but I ignored her, and she flew out the door, her face all red, and grabbed my shirt with one hand and my cheek with the other to drag me into the house.

  Mrs. Bell was one of the ladies who called me a wild animal. She smelled kind of funny, like medicine, and was always bossing people around. Her first name was Beatrice, and Dad called her Blubber Bee because she was so fat. Mr. Bell complained about me too, even though he had untied me from the tree more than once. I never saw him smile. Dad said he was a miserable henpecked son of a bitch.

  By the time Champ showed up and asked for Mom, her cries had become sniffles. She was still in her robe, and her hair was messy as if she had just woken up. Her eyes twitched wildly. Dad had been badly burned, Champ said, and he was in the emergency room. Though Champ rubbed my head and smiled at me, his gray eyes were sad. He said that some of the injured men might die, but he wasn’t sure about Dad.

  Soon more teary-eyed neighbor ladies stopped by to check on Mom. Champ’s wife drove her to the hospital, and the other ladies sat in our living room with Sam and me, whispering to one another and shaking their heads like Dad was never coming back—but I knew he would.

  When Lonnie got home from school, she had tears running down her cheeks. One of the men told her what had happened. “Dad tried to close the shut-off valve for the gas, but the turbine exploded,” she said, wiping her face on her sleeve. “He barely got out, and then he rushed a bunch of guys to the hospital in one of the trucks. He’s alive but burned all over.”

  It was dark when Mom came back from the hospital. She shook so much she couldn’t walk, and Champ’s wife had to help her inside. “Your daddy was wrapped up like a mummy,” Mom told us as she fell back onto the couch. “His chest didn’t move. They said he was still alive, but he looked dead to me.”

  Lonnie and I cried—after all, Mom had to know if Dad was really dead.

  “Thurston,” Mom yelled, “it’s not fair for you to die and leave me alone with the kids. You’re supposed to take care of me.”

  She got up and went to bed. Lonnie told me to pick up the toys on the floor and then opened cans of pork and beans for dinner. I minded my seven-year-old sister better than I did my mother. After Lonnie changed Sam’s diaper, fed him, and put him in his crib for the night, she tried to get Mom to eat.

  For many days after that, the neighbor ladies brought food and sat with Mom. They took turns driving her to the hospital, and when she walked through the door every night, we asked if Dad was alive. She shook her head. “I don’t think so, but they say he is.”

  One evening when she came into the house with her usual scared, frantic look, she said, “Your daddy is alive. I didn’t believe it—his face was so swollen and puffy after they took the bandages off. But he called out my name, so it must have been him.”

  Even then, Dad couldn’t leave the hospital for a long time, and the doctors wouldn’t let us visit. Our germs might kill him, they told Mom.

  When she finally brought him home in the Green Bomber, Lonnie and I ran to the car to meet him. Mom was right—he didn’t look like our big, strong dad. His head had swelled to the size of a pumpkin, and his eyes were like tiny BBs. His forehead and nose shined bright red, and flaky skin fell off his face. He moaned in pain. Mom changed Dad’s bandages, and he didn’t yell at her or hit her once.

  The people in the compound stayed sad for months, but Dad told us that EPNG employees understood the risks. Seven of his guys were badly burned in the explosion, and two never returned. New men replaced the injured ones, the turbine engines were repaired, and everyone went in and out of the compressor station just like before.

  Dad’s skin eventually healed, and he went back to work. Soon after, he started yelling at Mom again, telling her to go away.

  MOST OF THE TIME MOM didn’t know where I was. The neighbor ladies complained to Dad that I ran outside the entrance gate where kids weren’t supposed to go. Mom needed to watch me better, they said.

  “He can’t wreck anything outside,” he told them. “And nothing seems to hurt the little bastard.” The women didn’t think he was funny, but Dad didn’t care. He said breaking the compound rules was good training because Cherokees always had to make their own rules to survive.

  While driving their red trucks, the EPNG men would find me far from home, and they always stopped to pick me up. When they told Dad it wasn’t safe for me to be out in the desert, he laughed. “Don’t worry about David. He always finds his way back.”

  One morning, after Dad sent me home from the compressor station, I got in line for the school bus. Neither Lonnie nor the driver saw me sneak on board. When we pulled up to the elementary school in Ganado, I hid in the middle of the students as they got off the bus and walked into the building.

  But I didn’t get far. Lonnie ratted on me. The driver had to make the trip back to the compound wit
h only one passenger. She yelled at me for being a bad boy. I laughed, running up and down the aisle of the empty bus.

  My sister told everybody I was a snot-nosed little brat, always causing trouble. When I slipped onto the bus again, Lonnie didn’t spot me until I rolled out from under one of the seats. She wanted the driver to make me walk the twelve miles back home. And I would have done it, but I didn’t have to. The driver told me that if I’d wait until first grade to get on the bus, she’d give me a Davy Crockett canteen with a compass on it. That sounded like a good deal, so I took it.

  My other favorite thing to do was to go with Mom and Dad to get groceries at the Hubbell Trading Post, just down the street from the school. Nothing excited me more than to see Navajo Indians up close. All our neighbors were either Mexican or Anglo, and they never dressed the way the Navajos did when they came to town. The men braided their long, dark hair into a ponytail and wore turquoise bolo ties and black hats with bands of silver. The women wore beaded necklaces and bracelets and red velvet skirts. And the children looked like miniature versions of their parents.

  When we pulled into Hubbell’s, I’d dash over to the Navajo pickup trucks and horse-drawn wagons. Sometimes I chased their herds of sheep, making loud bleating noises. They would run in all directions, and the trading post manager would throw his hands in the air and yell at me. He would have to start counting them all over again.

  I thought it was funny, but Dad whopped me on the butt real hard. “Stop being a pain in the ass,” he said. “The Navajos want to sell their sheep, buy some stuff, and get the hell out of here. They don’t want to be bothered by your nonsense.”

  But I wanted to talk to them. I’d yell, “Yá’át’ééh,” or “Hello” in Navajo. Sometimes I made whooping noises like the Indians in the movies when they raided wagon trains. The men turned their backs, and the children dropped their eyes to the ground and stuck their hands in their pockets. The mean, older women tried swatting me, but I was too fast for them. I wanted to have fun—no one else at Hubbell’s did.

  CHAPTER 3

  DURING THE SCHOOL DAY, I had the compound to myself. None of the other young kids were allowed to roam free looking for trouble. One morning before Dad went to work, he saw me watching Shorty John through the living room window. “Look at that dumb Mexican shuffling. He barely lifts his feet off the ground.”

  Shorty worked at EPNG as a maintenance man. Every day he carried a long hose from house to house to water the tiny patches of grass in the yards.

  “He has no energy, David. No brains. I bet you could trick him easy, couldn’t you? Wouldn’t it be fun to sneak up on him and get him with the hose?” He laughed.

  Dad and I started playing what-if games. What if I stopped Shorty from watering the grass? What if the son of a bitch chased me—could I outrun him to the house or get beyond the cattle guard and make him give up? What if I made his job so unbearable he quit? Dad kept shaking his head. “A snail could move faster and with more purpose.”

  I sat on our front porch and studied Shorty and the hose. Then I’d creep up behind him and squeeze the hose into a V shape until the water stopped flowing. When he pointed the hose at his face to see what was wrong, I let go and watched it spurt into his eyes and nostrils. I giggled and ran away, always knowing the number of steps to my house so he couldn’t catch me.

  Sometimes I’d run up to him, pull on his pants, and laugh when he stumbled after me. After that got boring, I would wait until he went down the street, and then I’d run over to his truck and fill his lunch pail with fire ants and lizards, an idea I came up with on my own, without Dad’s help. I hid more ants inside his sandwich. When Shorty discovered what I had done, he chased me, but he was too slow to make the game much fun. He was easier to fool than Mom.

  Each time I told Dad how I outran Shorty or what his face looked like when water squirted out of his nose, Dad laughed and asked me to tell him more. He shook his head and slapped me on the back. “You are the cleverest little shit I’ve ever known.”

  And when the poor man requested a transfer because I wouldn’t stop, Dad treated me like a heavyweight boxing champion. He asked me to flex my muscles or run fast in front of his men, telling them that I could fool anybody and I would become a great fighter someday.

  Whether he and I were at Hubbell’s or in stores and gas stations outside Ganado, Dad told anyone who would listen how his four-year-old son defeated a full-grown man. He’d pull strangers aside. “Look at my boy,” he would say. “Listen to what he did.”

  But the men in the compound weren’t happy about what happened to Shorty. They said that the little guy had only been trying to do his job, that Dad had gone too far, egging me on the way he had. Dad just laughed.

  What were they talking about? Messing with Shorty was hilarious.

  AT THE DINNER TABLE, Dad told us stories about the Crow family. His big blue eyes teared up when he described how his Cherokee parents had struggled to survive the vicious white sons of bitches who abused them and how hard it had been to eke out a living in the Texas and Oklahoma dust bowls.

  “My parents worked me like a rented mule, forcing me to pick cotton for twelve hours a day by the age of six,” he said, shaking his head. “And white people hated our red asses.”

  His voice got quiet when he told us about his superior Cherokee intelligence and courage and how he could read at age four even though his dad never learned to read or write a single word of English. Dad went on to teach himself math, science, and physics and study the English classics by reading every book he could get his hands on, often by stealing them.

  Taylor, his father, drew his name on the army application when he signed up to serve in World War I—being able to read wasn’t necessary to handle a machine gun or march all day and night. His ship narrowly missed being sunk by a German U-boat on the way to Europe. He survived the war, but his lungs were damaged by mustard gas in a German attack during a ferocious battle in France.

  It wasn’t Taylor’s fault he was so mean, Dad said. The war had destroyed his mind and health, and he was never the same. Indians were treated horribly even when they defended their country against the German bastards.

  After the war, thirty-three-year-old Taylor married fourteen-year-old Ella Mae, a cousin of his first wife, who had been killed in an automobile accident. Dad was the only one of Taylor and Ella Mae’s children to survive. Taylor spent the rest of his life in and out of Veterans Administration hospitals and roughnecking in the oil fields, which amounted to hauling heavy pieces of drilling equipment. When that work dried up, he picked cotton, bootlegged, and fought any dumbass who crossed his path—a trait he passed on to his son.

  “My father sure as hell didn’t treat me right,” Dad said, stabbing the air with his fork. “He’d guzzle down moonshine and then storm into the house in a drunken rage and beat me with a wet rope.”

  But it was his mother, Ella Mae, who made Dad the angriest. She constantly smacked him around and yelled at him for not picking cotton fast enough, despite his ability to outdo most grown men.

  “She couldn’t wait to humiliate me, that miserable bitch.” He spat out the words, his nostrils flaring like he smelled something bad. “She worked me into the ground—no matter what I did, no matter how hard I worked, it was never good enough.”

  The three of them lived in rusted-out cars, under bridges, and anywhere else they could hide from the elements—or the police. Taylor had been caught selling moonshine, and he was always in debt. Dad scavenged trash cans for food. Mostly the Crows drifted from town to town looking for work and trying to stay alive.

  When he got to the part about his mother killing his father, Dad’s voice would break. Ella Mae, beaten one too many times, bumped off her husband by putting rat poison in his food. Twelve-year-old Thurston soon inherited a stepfather and two stepbrothers—“three of the most ignorant dipshit Okie inbreds ever conceived.” The happiest day of his life came when he turned eighteen and signed up for the navy. He
ate regularly for the first time, gaining thirty pounds.

  Then came the stories we loved best. Dad told us how he shot down countless Japanese Zeros in the Pacific as they swooped down to attack his aircraft carrier. All those suicide-bomber sons of bitches sank to their deaths in the cold ocean.

  Dad could have been killed. He was so brave.

  When he talked about Mom’s side of the family, Dad said that she was an Indian too because she was born in Quanah, Texas, named for the great chief Quanah Parker. Dad had to be right about that, Mom said. She remembered when the chief’s son wore an Indian headdress and paraded by her house on a tall, spotted horse.

  The Daltons had blue eyes, reddish-blond hair, and the whitest skin I’d ever seen. Like Lonnie, both Sam and I took after that side of the family. We didn’t look like the other Indians on the reservation or the ones on TV. We were the pale kind. Lots of Cherokees were as pale as ghosts, Dad said, so they could outrace the wind and the cavalry.

  Mom hated her mother too. Mary Etta left her husband, John Ben, several times, dragging her daughter across Texas from one crummy hotel room to another, making her scrub bathrooms and wait for her while she spent time with some of the men who stayed there. Mary Etta despised her husband. He lost their ranch during the depths of the Great Depression, forcing them into poverty. Mom said she was sad from her first memory, and so was everyone in her family.

  EVEN AT FOUR, I KNEW something wasn’t right about my parents’ stories. When Dad got excited, the details changed enough to make me think that some parts were missing and others weren’t true. One night after I used the bathroom, I heard them talking and crept to their bedroom door. They didn’t whisper, probably never suspecting anyone would listen.