Wild Horses

Chapter Five

With Jim and the dog Wookiee, Emma climbed the stairs that night for a last check on Suzy. She tucked the light summer spread around the child and kissed her sleeping face before closing the door on the child and the dog.

In their bedroom, she curled against Jim, facing away from the alarm clock's glow, her nose tucked against his neck, breathing the scent of his skin and cigar smoke and the lingering smell of the bay rum soap he shaved with. When he worked late at the hospital, she slept in his old flannel shirt for the comfort of his smell. It annoyed him to come home and find her like that. He'd say he wanted a woman to smell like a woman, not like an old cigar. And she'd laugh at his grumbling. And then, of course, he'd have to get the shirt off her.

"I'll make a call," he said now.

"To the police?"

"To Bryan. First thing Monday."

Bryan Jennings was his lawyer. And his best friend.

"About getting remarried?"

"About everything. It's what we pay him for."

She tried again to sleep, but Jim still lay wakeful at her side. The consciousness of his eyes staring up in the darkness, watching each lazy rotation of the ceiling fan, wouldn't let her rest. 

"You worry too much about the feds' radar. How bad can it be? I mean, what if we did have to go to Pakistan? I know what I hear on the news, but what's your country really like?"

"My country? It's beautiful there. And terrible."

"Sounds like here."

"Yes, like here. Like everywhere." He pauses, still staring upward in the dark, arms crossed behind his head. "You know anything about Indians?"

"No fair changing the subject."

"I'll tell you why I don't want to go to the cops about what you heard today. Isn't that something you wanted to know?"

"'Scuse me. For a second, I hoped you might want to talk about something cheerful. So, Indians. Like India Indians? Or like Pocahontas, Geronimo, Sitting Bull type Indians?"

"It was when I was an intern," Jim said. "The cops brought in an Indian kid, a Native, if that sounds more politically correct, a Kiowa, actually."

"Aren't Kiowas some of those scary Indians, like Comanches? They're still around?"

"They're still around. Want me to circle the wagons to keep the big, bad Indians away?"

"Sorry. You were saying?"

"He was just a kid, younger than me, maybe still in his teens. He had DT's bad, hallucinations, convulsions, everything. And between convulsions, he was violent, the ugliest language, ugly words said in a stupid way."

"It was the alcohol talking." She didn't want to remember her own language in the depths of alcohol, knowing there was even more she'd forgotten, had blacked out on, the words sour in her mouth, words with sharp edges that cut when she said them, cut Suzy. She buried her face against his neck, choking back a sob.

He snugged her close. "You don't have to hear this if you don't want to."

"I need to hear it. If it's why you're you, I need to hear it."

He sighed. "I recognized some of the kid's words -- I had that friend in college who was Kiowa, the one I told you about. I told the kid I was a friend, that he was safe. After the cops got him in constraints, they hauled him off to the drunk tank. He died there. I told him he was safe. I used his own language, and I lied."

"It wasn't your fault. Things happen."

"Just before they hauled him off, he had a lucid moment, just a flash. He looked at me and said, 'You're one of them. No matter what you look like on the outside, you're white inside.'"

She sat up. "I wasn't your fault! Damn it, it wasn't your fault!"

The dog down the hall in Suzy's room yapped, alarmed by Emma's outburst. Jim padded out in his pajama bottoms to reassure Wookiee, came back, closed the door.

Emma sat huddled in their bed. "So your college buddy taught you a couple of words. He was probably pulling your leg, told you something was the word for 'friend' when what it really meant was 'super bad dude.'"

Jim huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "I don't think think their language is that compact."

"So, what? You get deported, we end up going to Pakistan. You're afraid they'll say you're not really one of them anymore? That's you're only Paki on the outside, American on the inside? They won't try to kill you, will they? Because you're a Christian?"

Jim -- his previous name was Jilani -- had converted years ago. He'd taken the name of his dead friend at baptism as if that could resurrect him.

"I don't know." That's what his words said. But his voice said he expected to die.