He peers stubbornly at Father Travis.
You are mistaken! Romeo slaps his knees. Mistaken!
Romeo rounds up all of the scattered bits of who he is, or was, and flings them on the table.
Father Travis, he says with authority, I gathered every word from trusted sources. I assembled the whole report from pieces of information relayed to me by people who were on the ground that day. That terrible day. Even if the report doesn’t say exactly what I said, there is corroboration. It’s not like I wanted to find these things out.
These things aren’t things. Father Travis gestures at the paper. They’re not here.
These words, these connections, these facts. They fell into place. Little by little. They added up! Into an inevitable story. I made diagrams. I procured a box of tacks. Tacks were in my wall. Still there. I drew lines between words and then elided . . . do you know that word? The meaning of that word?
Yes.
Don’t you love that word? I fit these connections to other connections until a huger connection emerged.
What are you talking about? Elide doesn’t mean that. It means erase.
Or slur together!
Yes, like when you’re drunk, slurring, erasing part of your word.
Well, says Romeo, maybe. Erased the meanings between the salient points. Could have.
And then what?
And then, and then, well. Peter Ravich was there in the Alco parking lot, okay?
Romeo searches his hands, polishes his wrist, and tells Father Travis every detail of what he’d told Peter Ravich. He is still talking when Father Travis gets up. Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his own life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down off his face. He stands to follow Father Travis, still talking. Climbs upstairs and through the center aisle of the church, still talking, too stunned at himself to genuflect. Steps out the front door of the church.
From there, he can see down the hill into the marrow of the reservation town. High and mentally blasted as he is, he sees into each heart. Pain is dotted all around, glowing from the deep chest wells of his people. To the west the hearts of the dead still pulse, burning soft and green in their caskets. They stream out pale light from the earth. And to the south there are the buffalo that the tribe has bought for tourism purposes. A darkly gathered congregation. Their hearts also on fire with the dreadful message of their extinction. Their ghostly gathering now. Like us, a symbol of resistance, thinks Romeo. Like us, now rambling around in a little pen of hay getting fat. Like us, their hearts visible as lamps in the dust. To the east, also, the holy dawn of all the earth, every morning of every day, the promise and the weariness. He is so tired, Romeo. Because of course Peter will kill Landreaux. He saw this, has always known it. He doesn’t want to look north because he realizes he’s thought in the counterclockwise fashion that belongs only to the spirit world, where, it appears to him now, he belongs. His place of rest.
So thoroughly relieved and convinced is Romeo in that instant, and so fully does it seize him, the idea of his death, that he casts himself violently headlong down the twenty cement church steps, to the very base.
FATHER TRAVIS DROVE the parish outing van along the BIA road across to County 27 and pulled into the Ravich driveway. Landreaux’s Corolla was parked to one side of the drive, and Peter’s pickup was gone. Nola came out the front door and stood on the fussy little stone pathway to the drive, hands on her hips, full makeup, brightly frosted hair, immaculate pale outfit. She held his gaze pleasantly. As if she’d never seen him before.
Hello? Can I help you?
Is Peter home?
No.
I need to speak to him right away.
Nola gave him a suspicious flounce, and called Maggie. She came out, also smartly dressed.
What’s wrong?
Maggie could tell immediately that everything was not all right. Not all right again. And she had tried so hard with the family photograph! But clearly, something had happened with her dad. He’d acted weird the whole way back. And now the old Vin Diesel priest.
Can you tell me where your dad went?
I’ll look around, she said to Father Travis. Just wait.
Maggie walked through the house with her radar on. Her mother kept everything so exactly in its exact place that Maggie could always feel, before she even saw, what was different about a room.
Maggie came back outside.
He took his best deer rifle.
Thank you, said Father Travis.