"The Boy in the Stagecoach"
by
Timothy Stillman
(for Pike Bishop's friend, and my mentor, thank you--all the mistakes in this story are mine)
There was the--sheerness of everything. And the immensity in the sky that was flinging morning over the whole--Earth. Manny was ten the year of the stage coach. There in the tumble of it. The fortuity of it. Away out West. Where the sky and the earth met in a distance that was never quite to be reached. Manny of the poor breeches and the heart song that sang silent in his bird sick chest, his pasty skin that barely reached round him, his lank dark hair, his eyes that were lusterless and somehow indecent for a boy that age. As he scrunched himself tightly into himself, as though he had little right to take up the space that he did, and the smell of the heat of the day coming on already in the mid summer, as his legs trembled and his hands spread spans of equidistant between the string puzzle he was playing with and which helped him think things through, gave him a starting and stopping point in a land, in a time, that seemed to have neither.
The other passengers--a conglomeration of weeds--one, an ineffectual seeming little man of indeterminate age who rocked himself to sleep, mumbling, a bit of spittle every so often blowing in the wind of the left side of his thin mouth, eyes half closed, watching the boy or not watching the boy across from him--one, a woman, next to the boy, who kept her prim lips to herself and her eyes to Zane Gray in her hands of rings and things and a thimble on one thumb-- and the last, an elderly man who was nearly bald, hatted, and soaked in whatever smell comes with a certain livery of fine clothes, sharp duds, with a shiny long rifle propped in front of him, a straightness of body, a visage of form that said he had made it, had successfully climbed over everything and everyone to the top, a pipe in his mouth, smoke belling up from it, a man who kept his own countenance and needed acknowledge no one else, especially not a little peashooter like Manny.
The stage pulled and hauled and rocked and hurt Manny. It jostled on its wood carriage, the horses hooves clomped on ahead, an occasional curry whip from the driver, desultory talk between the driver and his partner, the creaking of time and the creaking of maneuvers of horses hooves and the sun stealing in and stealing the soap smell from Manny from his early dark silent morning ablutions, as he quietly had gotten out of his bed, and had begun to make his way from the rickety board home of his mother while she slept, beginning the first steps of his journey. Manny was going far away, had saved and bartered and done chores for neighbors, had dwelled on this trip because he had had to get away, from the school, from his mother, from the house they lived in, from himself. He had to get away from the way broadcloth made him sweat, even as he wore a broadcloth shirt now, the way his boots hurt, cheap, second hand, the way his life was cheap, second hand, and he was perspiring and apologizing silently for it. The creases in his neck were dirty even though he had used the lye soap till his skin tingled and reddened.
He was going on an unfinished dream, to Pawnee country, if he could find it, to live with them if he could find them, for he had read in his school learning book, and he had dreamed of clouds formed of mountains and mountains of clouds, he had seen the shimmer of the need for communion, for becoming a man, for staying a boy, for riding naked out to buffalo hunts, for being with other braves, for wearing a feather in his hair and nothing at all on his body. He felt the need of rawhide teepees. The need to dance in the shadow of his sun that was wolf and bear and antelope spirits. To get away from the men and the women who ran his life, and his mother's, the small village, the dot of nowhere in the greater nowhere from which he had come. He was a tightly drawn boy who did not want the success of the bald man with the Stetson new and fresh and store bought. He did not want the dreams lackluster of the young or middle age man who dreamed and slobbered as he dreamed. He did not want to be the prim woman in black with a crepe neck and eyes that fastened clasp like to that book in front of those eyes that dreamed of her not being a toad, which she was and always would be, the hump of her, the mold of flab of her in the black dress and the heavy cameo broach at her neck.
Manny was an Indian in his mind even now, as he looked out the open window, as he put his arm on the ledge of the door, and felt the minute sparkles of heat fry it there, as he dreamed himself a Pawnee and needing of counting white scalps, needing of rites of passage, needing of boys like himself who would ride painted ponies, who would don breechcloths for the morning ride, and then discard them for the afternoon swims. How he longed to swim naked with other boys, free and wild and laughing and boisterous. How he longed not to be pale face and thin and gawky. The day stamped Indian boys on his mind, the lay of the land, the lay of the freedom that gained purchase with dark raven colored hair, with arms and legs and stomachs and thighs that were full of sinew and strength, that knew how to beaded moccasin walk and not to make a sound, that would take him into their fold, as though they were a wolf pack and he the new cub, to be cuddled in the noon day sun, to feel the warm good earth beneath his flanks, to tussle and wrestle with the boys of the dark faces and the bodies that were like church color glass in the day and what they made out of it.
Manny closed his legs tighter because he was now sporting an erection. It had been giving him trouble every day increasingly so, and he watched the mountains blue in the distance, he remembered the drawing he had seen of an Indian boy diving into a blue lake, a boy who was naked, the drawing from the back side, the spine straight and strong, the hips loving like tear drops turned to human flesh, the arms extended proudly serenely hurriedly, the drawing that Manny had made himself on his paper when the class drowsed in the noon day heat and he sat in his little wooden chair with the small table in front of him, as he drew his dreams in his restless brain and then tore them up. Daring only to commit them to memory. But the heat of it was his own teepee. The imagination of a tent that was filled with summer day sun and caught the sickness of the world and turned it outside the flaps, the drawings, the enumerations of stick figures of animals on the tent walls, the comforting Indian chants, the way the sun yellowed and made golden what was inside and that included Manny and his golden flesh and the close tight overwhelming heat prairie grass floor smell of it all. Sun gods for Manny. Sun gods and no more sourdough biscuits. Sun gods who rode tall in the shadows that were like miniature cold winters all round the braves as they picked him up from this every day world, as the boys hurled him round in good fun, and prodded him with their long dirty fingers, and played mumblety peg and hide and seek. As they stalked deer and rabbit. And all of it so deliciously free. All of it so deliciously seductive and tender. Committing spirit to selves and to the great gods of the Pawnee and the animals in thanks for the banquet.
Manny wanted to bring himself off. His left hand rested near his cock. His left hand--feverish, like a spider dancing on a hot stove, with the fingers for its legs. He pulled his head back inside the stagecoach. He looked surreptitiously around himself for anyone noticing him, but saw he was safe, always blessedly damnably safe, for no one knew he was there. Manny leaning back, gulping, throat dry, needing water from that cool sloshing canteen the man of indeterminate age had over there next to him in his cobweb dreams. Manny afraid to ask for water. Afraid to make a sound, for sad Manny and quiet Manny and never makes a bit of trouble Mrs. Driscoll, he's the sweetest most darling, (oh god, the guys didn't hear that, did they?) most attentive pupil I ever had. And Manny needing to find his Pawnee heritage though he had none, but he needed it just the same. He needed to stalk behind other naked boys. He needed to see their dark sun flanks. He wanted to see the curves of their hips as they bent partly over, their knives in their hands at the ready, to take what was theirs, to take the land back that was rightfully their own, for Manny was well schooled in the library the school possessed, all 20 books in a dark airless little woodshed tacked onto the one room school house, as he took his dreams there after and before school and manufactured the words of them. And the need to see the crossbows. The headdresses. The arrows flying straight to the heart of the men who stole everything out from under his people.
He looked out at the world bobbing drifting slamming tumbling around him and he wanted to shout out come and take me, come and make me pay for what has been done to you. Teach me how to survive the sweat tent. Get your medicine men to doctor me and take the whiteness away from me, the blandness, the baldness inside me. His mouth hung open though he was unawares. His penis made a little indentation in his slack breeches. He was a boy of shadows and he needed to lie on a rock of silver underneath a sun of gold, with a waterfall cascading nearby, he needed to be there with his breechcloth pulled up, his balls and penis exposed, his hairless little body for anyone to see. For anyone to see from their own quietness, their own stealth, as the other Indian boys came to him, on wings of silence. As he knew they were around him and circling him, this curious crude odd white boy who had somehow been flung into their midst. Their eyes of dark night. Their hands that held their knives dangerous deep sharp water blades of death, the kind a boy dreams about abed alone, in secret. When there are shining currents in his eyes that are more than tears and named something he has no nomenclature for.
To be on that rock, to be wiggling his hips, feeling the luxuriousness of it, to be rubbing his penis with an unfrightened, sure, beckoning hand, to be blinded by the sun, to put his hands where the boys would see him caressing himself, to need them and to want them, and to make them need and want him, the sweat of him, the newness of him, the blind illusions that he could push from himself, and to close his eyes and wait for that humid boy hand touch that did not belong to him, to have another boy hand on his thigh, on his chest, to feel the machinery inside himself. The delicate tickling fingers of the hand on his bareness, as Manny sighed silent "ah."
To feel the clocks broken and tossed aside. Bought and bolden and golden and away from the white man race forevermore. To look into eyes that were somehow preternatural beyond-animal and human eyes, that were not his in his bedroom looking glass. To look into eyes that were eyes of the forests and the glades, to have that sensuous sinuous face close to his, there in the heat and the bugs and the day and the waterfall near by, cascading little multi color elbows of water hitting them from time to time. To feel the stab of desire. The feel of his penis being observed and considered, so much smaller than that of the older braves whose own breechcloths were poking out with their own erections. Steeples, he thought, we are steeples of a new land, a religion that prays across deserts and sand and oceans and other worlds where our ancestors go and chase the sun buffalo up there in the clouds where we stand for depth and for noble and for a purpose. And the boys would take him and would teach him how to grow sun kissed, how to be something that counted, how to be finally seen by humans in the world that deserved seeing him and who he deserved being seen by. No isinglass curtains on buckboard lanes there in the moonlight. No other boys and their girls giggling brainlessly and smooching in the school house yard before and after school. No moony eyes and swelled heads and goofy looks and words. There would be dignity with the Pawnee. There would be the smoldering rightness of boys at play in the fields and the approval of parents and the tough men and the aged men and the tough women and the aged women, and there would be no girls. There would be no latches to open and no doors to keep an eye on for getting out of at a moment's notice.
Just the immense openness of everything. Just the joy of sleeping in a Pawnee made bedroll by a fire of a winter night. The flames red and brown and gold and the coals that would spark and dance with the wood of his dreams, that would break the wooden dreams open and find gold dust dancing in there, as some Pawnee boy leaned over him and asked with his beseeching eyes if he could share Manny's bedroll, and Manny inviting him in that cold night, the boy the heat of a thousand summers of all the ancestors the boy would know about, would know the intimate details about, the lineage, the history fixed firmly in his mind, the continuity giving a straight line, not the hit and miss of white culture, as Manny would push his little boy fingers through the brave's long heavy black hair and the boy would lay heavily on Manny (who would have to change his name, or then again, perhaps not, it might fit finally, where he was going) and their cocks would rub their hardness against each other. They would kiss deeply. The brave would put his tongue in Manny's mouth and Manny would drink of the sweet wood nectar that was there being inserted. As their legs tangled. Manny's thin but strengthening against the brave's strong firm legs. As they would giggle quietly there in the midst of all that strong eventual peace.
As the brave would hold his oak arms round the boy who would nuzzle into them, and feel the strong fire heat of the brave, the cold of the night, the roar of the campfire, the presence of the distant and right now boys of dreams who would be here and soon, these boys, the night before the day of a wild antelope hunt, all round the early morning campfire, their ponies stirring close by, whinnying at times, and the smell of boy would be everywhere, as Manny and his lover--think of it, his lover--would take their winter clothing off completely, and they would feel each inch of the other's body. Their fingers would trace forest shaped delicacies on their skins and they would be enraptured and they would be making sex as the other boys around the campfire woke piecemeal and watched and approved. The same boys who had watched Manny naked on the slender blue rock in the burgeoning summer hot sun day. The same boys who had let Manny stalk naked with them through the brush, who had observed him closely at a distance, cautiously, ready to bolt at a moment's notice, as he had observed them. Feinting. Shyly. Dancing a bit closer. Pulling back. Avoiding eyes. Meeting then finally eyes that did not turn away.
But that was then. This was now. And the day sun seeming to suck the flesh from the inside out. And the plodding horses and the rattling creaking stagecoach pulled them all along interminably and the sun heated and the sun overpoured their sweat, the carriage reeked of it, the carriage of human bodies with their white bones and their white flesh and their white thoughts and their white dullness. And the elderly man pulled his wide tall Stetson off his head and he pulled out a huge blindingly white handkerchief from his coat pocket, and mopped the sweat off his baldness, and then he put the handkerchief back in the pocket of his charcoal gray suit and with such an important flourish, pulled out a large costly (mother and I could live a year on what he spent for that one item) golden pocket watch that glinted in the sun.
And as the man flipped the face of it open to check the time (and what difference the time for any of them?) Manny imagined the light flickering signal of the sun on the gold watch case tripping the sensitive keen watchful ever patient eyes of Indians on a close by hill who were on horses that were palominos, horses taken for this advent of the stage coach, to race to it, war whoops like long soap bubbles made of grease paint following them in the thick cloying air, as they galloped to the dusty road along which this broken down contrivance of man made its desultory way. And the flick of the whip of the drivers, the calls and the curses at the horses.
The stagecoach lurching forward. The black little kidney shaped hat of the old woman next to the boy falling off, the book knocked asunder, her little black cotton stocking spindly legs sticking up as the suddenly silly cawing woman was pummeled this way and that, and the well to do gentleman biting his pipe stem in half, the pipe dropping in pieces, the smoldering tobacco on the wooden floor seething, and the slobbering dreaming young old man awoken with a shout of his own, from his reverie, his half opened eyes now wide open and all their ears battered with the war whoops descending on them, as the world was filled with horses hooves, as the Pawnee raiding party was coming for Manny who was shouting himself and gesticulating his arms at the Indians--"Here! Over here!"
As the very earth rumbled with the tension of it all, as Manny looked for his saviors coming closer and closer as the world bent down and pried open the top of the stagecoach and Manny was pulled out on feather arrows and deposited on a riderless palomino next to the other men and boys, and he rode with them, and rode to the stage coach like an open can and the people inside screamed, and the old man pulled up his rifle, and tried to cock it, when he got presence of mind, while that fear curdled in him all that correct carriage, all that who needs people? bearing, making thrown about Manny laugh aloud.
As the sheer horripulating terror, and the jounce, the bounce of the coach knocked rifle and man asunder as well, as it also did the pipe cleaner legs and arms of the no longer drowsing spittle man who would pull a Bible from his saddlebag next to him, a Bible that a flaming arrow would strike right in the center of, in partial payback for all the things that book had been used as an excuse to destroy a proud people for reasons that had nothing to do with a God or a man on a cross dying for our sins amen. And there was much fear, and Manny inside the stagecoach and outside with his new family, Manny in war paint, Indian clothing, hand to mouth whooping, bow and arrows on his back, on his horse that was all thunder and muscle and strength and godhood beneath him and around him and Manny counting the sheer magnificence of being allowed to ride the beast, and Manny inside the coach, on the torn muslin covered seat board, and Manny on the horse, doppleganger after himself, both of him, cheering them on, take me, take me, and thinking this, his throat hurt like he had a fever and the whooping cough again, and he coughed loud and hard and leaned over and spat up a drop or two of coppery tasting blood.
Copper like the taste of Indian breeches. Copper like the copperhead he would arrow shoot with such skill and precision right in the back of the neck deom his big crossbow. Copper like the taste of pennies of water that his young lovers would toss like magic coins to him as he lay on his rock of slender sliver, as the boy above him shadow in the hot tiger sun had taken off Manny's breechcloth and bent to kiss Manny down there where he had so ached to be kissed by a boy especially. And copper his eyes and sun blind copper and he bent over and he pulled back. There were no Indians coming for him.
There was no runaway stagecoach. There was no rifle pulled by the driver to be knocked out of his hands and flung away from him as an arrow took him off the seat and turned him into a parenthesis mark diving him to the hard earth below. There was only a pasty runt boy with something of a rat face bending over and then pulling back. The other passengers finally seeing him, staring at him, as the boy coughed, self-consciously wiped his chin with the back of his left hand, and vaingloriously pulled his head out the carriage again and as he begged please someone please.
The dust and grit and horse smell and waste and the rocks and gravel and the little pummels of the white world that somehow did not mingle, did not smell, did not taste, did not have the resonance they would in the Pawnee world though the objects, the results were the same, for there was the white barrier for all of them, for Manny too, who had lost his erection, who was flushing with shame at having become the center of attention in just the wrong way, and the wind blew a hot bitter steel taste of wing of noon time on him, and he longed for his butt to stop hurting from this ride and more of the ride to come, the wooden wheels and the shakes and the wooden legs that were made his own instead of flesh and bone legs he once had, and he just knew when the stage stopped if it ever did he would on getting out, fall flat on his face, and everyone would laugh at him for sure then. Now his bladder full. The woman beside him mumbling to the proper man across from her. The smug smiles all three adults had trained on the boy even though the boy did not look at them to see he was right, for he was. So what Manny did was (so shockingly un-Manny like) to raise his sore tail off the torn muslin covered seat and cut the fart he had been holding in for at least three miles now, that he had been unaware of till this moment when it felt like a huge box had been pressed sideways into his abdomen. The fart smelled something awful and made an almighty rude as could be sound. It felt so good. Why had he not done this before when with others? The kids would love him for this. He couldn't wait to tell them. Though he knew they would not believe them. So one day in school, he would have to prove it to them--teacher, too--teacher, most especially, so from that day forward, Manny would no longer be the sweetest, nicest boy the teacher had ever had.
The two men harumpped. The old man smoked his pipe, harder, then choked on all that tobacco smoke in his lungs. The woman moved her bustle self as far away from Manny as she could. She coughed deeply, said "I never..." in a grating little simpy voice, and rustled the pages before her of a Western while she was in the Western which made no sense at all, and Manny laughed, he looked out the open window and he laughed as hard as he could, he guffawed, he cackled, he heehawed, he bellowed, he peed a little bit in his pants, making a most unsightly stain, he roared, he was his own waterfall of laughter cascading, and the little elbows of his giggles, his hilarity, his mirth, hit the passengers in the stagecoach with him, where the smell of the fart mixed with all that sweat of bodies and clothing and pipe tobacco made the air pretty rank indeed. The man of indeterminate age settled himself down as best he could to go back to a half sleep again, mumbling the words, "little savage" as the boy looked over at him, and the man looked at the boy. They locked eyes for a long moment. Manny found himself oddly unfrightened. Found himself oddly angry and showing it, regardless of the consequences.
The man almost smiled at him but Manny (so un-Manny like, those weak eyes that needed glasses, and all) looked at him coldly and calculatingly, until the man stopped smiling, sniffed a bit, broke eye contact, jostled his arms and elbows about his chest, as he pretended to calmly drop off one more time, though keeping a defensive eye out for that boy was a real wrong 'un for sure.
And Manny, looked out the window, and the dirt and dust creased him and the sun wilted him, and he sighed, as he waited for the stagecoach to get to its first stop, so he could turn around and go home again. He could be a Pawnee some other day. He was still very young. There was time. He decided there were some things he wanted to teach the pale faces first. Looked to him like it would be fun. The string puzzle had hung limp and unnoticed by the boy for some time, from his left hand, then the string tumbled out into the dust, unneeded.
The horses plodded on and the wooden wheels turned in great ceaseless circles as the sun burned down hard hot and relentless on the interminable spaceless endless blue sky and green land below and the world continued to revolve, infinitely Pawnee- patient.
the end