Wanting to Say Things: The Power of Stories
AN ANTHOLOGY OF NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE
from The Death of Jim Loney (Part 1, Chapter 17) by James Welch
The wind was blowing directly from the south and it filled Loney’s body with
a sharpness it hadn’t felt in some time. He shivered, not from the wind but from the sharpness. Then he grew still and his eyes cleared and he saw the rocky shadows of Snake Butte in the distance. It was flat on top and covered with grass. The top looked just like the prairies that surrounded it, but the sides were gunmetal gray and from a distance they looked smooth and sheer. They weren’t, though; they were made up of jagged columns of granite and shallow caves. Loney knew this from his childhood, and he also knew about the etchings on the flat stones on top—the crude drawings of deer and fish and lizard. Snake Butte was a perfect fortress and it was assumed that Indian hunters had made the etchings many years ago. Loney used to fish the small reservoir at the base of the butte when he was a kid and he never got over the feeling that there were lives out there. Even now it was not good to think about it.
He breathed in the wind and he felt a sudden tightness in his chest. His shoulders ached and his neck felt knotted up. He hugged Swipesy to his knee and he remembered the drinking and smoking and thinking he had done the week before. And the party at Rhea’s. Had that been last night? It must have been. He remembered the people in the living room, then lying in the dark room, then Rhea lying beside him. She had been talking and he had been thinking of Seattle, the mountains and the ferryboats. What did clam chowder have to do with it? The idea made him hungry. He looked into his neighbor’s yard and he could see the end of the clothesline. Two shirts had wrapped around each other as though they were desperate friends. Again he thought of Seattle and the whole memory came back: She had wanted him to go to Seattle with her. Just like that. It was beautiful there—trees, rain, the bay, the buildings. He used to watch the ferries. Had he said yes? What about her teaching; had they decided when they would go? Had he said yes? He couldn’t have. He couldn’t make a decision like that. He needed to think. He wasn’t ready to do anything but sit on his step and think, and so he watched the two shirts twist and know around each other and he though, not of Seattle, but of the blue veins on the backs of his neighbor’s legs.
Editor's Imitation
The sunlight was piercing the stillness in
jagged slivers and it filled Rhea’s body with a shock she hadn’t felt in some time. She had been curled up in an armchair, ignoring the calendar in front of her and following the glittering dust instead. She shivered, not from the cold but from the feeling that she was in a spotlight. Headlights. Jacklight.
She pulled her mom’s quilt closer around her shoulders. She closed her eyes and saw her parents’ dinner parties, the Texas bars, the dust, the too-eager, too-closer, too-threatening grins of Texas men who leaned up next to her. These whirlwinds were replaced by an image of Loney sitting motionless at his kitchen table, the only movement being the smoke rising from his cigarette and mug of instant coffee.
She breathed in and noticed the scent of Lysol. She remembered the party, the spilled booze she cleaned up last night, the spilled spirits she never recovered. She remembered the faceless people in the living room, then lying next to Loney in the dark room as if lying next to a corpse in a coffin. She told him she had been thinking of Seattle. Clam chowder had nothing to do with it—she just needed something that could fill her and motion that didn’t feel like turbulence.