of her cigarette, threw it to the curb, and slammed the door shut. Then she slung her workout bag over her shoulder and disappeared into the club.
Conover waited a moment and then got out of his car. He made his way through the crowded lot to where the blond woman had tossed her cigarette. He bent down and picked up the still-smoldering butt. The green lettering on the filter was clearly visible—Kool. Conover smiled and started walking toward the gym.
TOM SNAG
BY LAURA TOHE
Indian School Road
The waitress at Denny’s had just turned down his proposal for a drink. His old hook ’em line, “I’ll tell you my Indian name,” no longer enticed. She wasn’t buying his tired act. She tore the check out of her book and slapped it down next to his coffee cup. “You pay up front,” she said, and pointed with her chin in the direction of the cash register, then turned away. He watched her walk away and lusted after her ass anyway.
Lately he was losing his touch with picking up women. Hell, maybe it wasn’t so lately. He looked at his braids hanging across his chest. His hair was thinning and his braids were getting down to the diameter of a plastic straw, though it was still black thanks to his mother’s genes. He was grateful that he didn’t have to pour dye on it monthly the way some nosebleed Indians did.
He was wearing the T-shirt he took from his son’s closet. Path was written across his chest in big white letters and he had no idea what it meant. His once thin torso had taken a turn south and now stationed itself around his thickened waist. Surprised that he jiggled when he laughed, he took up running in the mornings at the old Indian School grounds. One morning he tripped on the gravel and came down hard. “Damnit!” Tom had rubbed his ankle, hoping it wouldn’t swell. Boarding school still kickin’ my ass, he thought.
Used to be he could walk into a conference, a bookstore, a nightclub, and the women would turn their heads at the tall, dark, handsome Indian man who could’ve been on the cover of the romance novels they scooped up in the grocery line, his hair draped over the pulsing pink bosom of the woman in his toned arms. When he was younger he let it hang loose like a wild pony testing the spring wind. Long hair drew the looks and the women. Someone once asked if he was the actor, Wind in His Hair in Dances with Wolves. It became a line he used to pick up women. “Did you see Dances with Wolves? That was me,” he lied to a co-ed who paid for his drinks at the college bar after a poetry reading at MCC. Time was when he could turn the charm on like a light, when women dropped into his lap and all he had to do was scoop them up.
Did he ever love any of them? He wanted to tell one that she was the love of his life, his candle in the wind, his San Francisco peak.
Eliza was a Jew and a former hippie and New Yorker. She was a nurse and rotated among programs and facilities in Phoenix. Tom was working at the Phoenix Indian Center at the time coordinating GED programs for the urbs. Eliza arrived one afternoon to give flu shots to the elderly Indians. Tom helped set up chairs and brought her a cup of coffee during her break, which she accepted though she normally avoided caffeine. She stirred the coffee and impulsively told him she hated that Indians were forced to live on reservations like concentration camps.
“Now their land is being taken from them again and they must live in the cities. Doesn’t it just make you angry?” she asked.
“Hell, we’re survivors,” Tom proclaimed dismissively.
After only four months, Tom decided to give marriage another go around. Their courtship had been a rather staid affair in comparison to the women he’d fucked in the backseats of their BMWs, Audis, and even a red VW bug, their bodies damp and sticking to the leather. Over a spaghetti and meatball dinner Eliza had once asked, “If you had one wish, what would it be?”
He slurped up strands of pasta that resembled roots growing from his mouth.
“May I?” she asked, and picked up his spoon and twirled the pasta onto it and offered it to him.