He had never seen the ocean before. He said as much to the young man in the denim jacket beside him who snorted, blowing out an opalescent thread of smoke then flicking the butt into the chop below. The young man ran a hand up his back until is rested at the hunch of his neck.
"That's nothing baby. I'll take you out to the coast. There are trees there as wide as Buick's' and the only thing on the other side of that ocean is fuckin' Japan."
Later that night, they had fucked in an alley like teenagers going at it under the bleachers at a pep rally.
He didn't remember the man's name, just another fuck; except that he had been there at the pier, with his cigarette, watching the ferry come in across the open water.
He did go to the coast, many times after that making his way through the cedars to the cold beaches of the Washington coast. He finally understood why prairie grass was always described as rolling waves; it had been an ocean once, a great inland sea ridden by buffalo, trolled by prairie larks before it was broken by wagon trains, steam engines, and barbed wire.
There had been a barbed wire fence his father made him and his brothers put up along the road. As the youngest he held the spool of wire threaded onto a baseball bat as his brothers ran it out onto the posts they pounded down in the Montana heat. The spool was too heavy for him, his arms shook under its weight until he dropped it onto his foot. Barbs had punctured his thin sneakers and little pinpricks of blood doted the dingy canvas. That was the first time his father called him a faggot.
"What's wrong there Sandy? Too heavy for your faggity little arms?"
Daddy liked to say that his people were the pioneers that built the country - and they might have been. Poor Swedes or Irish with nothing good in their lives that could deter them from the dream of free land and the certainty of back breaking work with an early death. His mother was a quarter Lakota. Sandy sometimes wondered if the scars the nuns had left on the ankles of his great-great grand mother had been passed down to his mother. Hobbled at fifteen by the first of six pregnancies and a forced marriage, she was hesitant to speak - it was as if her voice has been thrashed out of her just as the native language had been beaten from her grandmother. He never saw Daddy raise a hand to her, and with the exception of the odd broken wooden spoon on a backside, he didn't hit the kids. But he hit other things, punched through a wall or two and at one point put his foot through the coffee table stamping it to splinters. It took years for Sandy to realize how little difference that made. It was all a show, meant to frighten just as effective as a black eye or a broken bone.
It came as a surprise when she divorced him. Sandy was in his last year of high school, already staying out most nights, smoking pot and listening to Dylan records in the room above is friend Grants garage. She got the house in the settlement, but Daddy never moved out. He just moved into the basement and Mom was still bent and quiet. That summer he kissed Grant one night and the next day hitched a ride to Missoula.
He stayed for a few months, piecing together odd jobs, sweeping floors, laying tile, and painting houses; he painted one old man's house in trade for an old Lakota headdress. A "war bonnet" the old man called it. Its leather was sweat stained and the turkey feathers a little beaten but it had a band of blue and yellow beads - the old man had been short on cash. He kept it in a frayed Fredrick and Nelson dress box and packed it with him onto a Greyhound to Seattle. His draft card caught up with him a few months after getting off the bus at Kings Street. He joked the night before he reported in that he would wear the headdress with nothing but chaps to the draft office and plead gay. He didn't wear it, but he did answer the questions truthfully. "Yes, he had broken that toe" and "no just like the rest of him it was not quite straight". He did wear the headdress after that, and the chaps, and he danced in every bar on Capitol Hill.
One year his mother came out to visit him. He was between lovers, living in the spare room of the young woman he worked with at the flower stall in the Public Market. At the end of the days, whatever had not sold came home with them in great clouds of bruised petals. His mother sat at the table, hunched and chased a tiny ant fallen from a heavy peony blossom around the maze of the checked tablecloth.
Years later, after a long silence Sandys' Mother called. Daddy died. For the first time in years he turned east again. The growling Chevy dipped down out of the mountains as the sun filled the orchard valley below like a hot bath. Under the sticky cider cloy that hit his nose there was a faint sweet smell of the grass ocean that stretched beyond the Bitterroot. He drove a straight line, through Coeur d'Alene, past Bozeman, Billings, deep into the empty swell of the prairie.
He only stopped five times: three times for gas and twice to piss. After fourteen hours the Chevy grumbled down the main street, what there was of it. He couldn't tell if the clench in his gut was from all the shitty gas station coffee or the familiar, silent judgment peering through every narrow window. He remembered them all, little stings spit from mouths whose world was so small it held only this stretch of run down storefronts and the empty hiss of the grass.
Sandy expected to find his brothers and sister filling the first row of folding chairs at the mortuary. He would sit on the end, with his sisters' restless seven year old beside him - still the odd one out of a line of hard chins and thick farmers' calves. They would bury Daddy quietly under a simple stone and after Sandy had dropped his one shovel full of earth on the casket he would never look back. There would be no tears, only shuffled feet, and the seven year old whining that he was bored.
When Sandy swung down the street he found every inch of curb lined with cars. Big truck with jacked up wheels, panel vans, Broncos with gun racks. From what he could see, creeping down the street hunched over the wheel, everyone was streaming to the funeral parlor. He pulled in behind a Land Rover on a side street three blocks over. The family that was getting out of the car had two little boys, both with Mohawks, wearing clean, white shirts and little black neck ties. Their dad wore a white button down as well, but no tie, sleeves rolled above his wrists. The neck was open showing the rib of his wife beater, under that the shadow of big, black tattoos that crept up his neck and down his arms. His wife was blond from a bottle, average looking, leaning over her boys, tucking their shirts back into their pants. Sandy turned off the engine, took a deep breath and tried to settle the tightness that bloomed in his belly. He got out of the car and wiped his palms on his creased jeans. The dad looked up when the door slammed and nodded. As Sandy started walking toward the mortuary the family fell in step beside him. "It's a shame man. Not sure what we're going to do without him. It's always rough when we lose a leader. So many politics. What charter you from?" The dad held out his hand, walking lock step beside him. Sandy stopped dead looking at the offered hand, then without missing a beat he looked him straight in the eye and shook it - his thumb covering the black swastika just over the knuckle. "I'm his son..." Sandy said smoothly. "Sorry this is my reason for coming back." The dad shook his head. "Sorry man. Your father was a great man."
Sandy sat beside his family, his back straight, his eyes locked on the flag draped over his fathers casket. It quivered every time a new mourner got up to the podium, making the black leg of the swastika twitch. Beside him, his sister held the hand of the seven year old so tight that at one point he complained only to be quickly hushed.
The procession of cars that followed the hearse to the cemetery was so long that they were still arriving as the flag was folded and the casket was lowered into the earth. Sandy fought the bile that rose up in his throat and dropped his spade full of dirt.
That evening they all sat in silence at their mothers kitchen table. She said nothing, just chased the rows of squares on the checkered tablecloth with her finger. When the FBI agent knocked and asked if he could examine her late husbands effects, she corrected him, "Ex-husband. Take it all."
