Night of the Living Rez

“I did, but I didn’t want to be in my room. I wanted to help, to be part of it all. Whatever it all was.”

Here, David struggles to understand what has happened to Paige and why action needs to be taken. This passage demonstrates Talty’s willingness to withhold clear explanations of ambiguous situations. This embrace of ambiguity mirrors the experience of being a child and struggling to make sense of the challenges and traumas that adults try to protect children from.

“I brought my plate to the sink. My hands shook and the fork on the plate rattled. I rinsed the plate and slid it under a dirty bowl. There was one piece of bacon left and I wanted to eat it, to chew on it and release a primal rage, but Fellis took it before I could and stuffed it into his mouth.

He smiled at me and I broke his fucking nose.”

This passage showcases Talty’s craft in building and releasing tension in a way that mirrors Dee’s experience. The first paragraph uses mundane character action to show Dee’s mounting rage; the anger is expressed only in nearly imperceptible actions, reflecting the suppressed nature of Dee’s emotions. The short, declarative second paragraph describing the release of Dee’s violence creates a sense of surprise following the much more detailed, descriptive first paragraph.

“‘Honey,’ she said, maybe passing me a plate or a spoon to dry, ‘men are so self-absorbed and so proud they would like to think they created themselves.’”

Here, Dee recalls his mother offering a critique of masculinity. This passage appears in flashback in the story; this particular anecdote has stayed with Dee since he was a child. This suggests that Dee, in spite of the damaged and damaging ways he expresses his masculinity, is still reflecting on how to enact a healthier masculinity.

“‘I do know what it feels like,’ she said. “Like the whole world is warped, like something is off balance that will never be balanced again. And guess what? It won’t ever be balanced again. Every morning’s deformed, the day so close to spinning out of control, but you have to find your footing, your own balance.’

‘Well maybe you’re throwing off my balance,’ he said. ‘You ever think of that?’”

Here, David’s mother opens a dialogue with Frick about the nature of grief after losing a child. David’s mother’s diction—“warped” and “deformed”—suggests that she has formed a cohesive articulation of how grief affects her and the way she moves through the world. Frick, by contrast, is only able to cope through aggression, demonstrated here by his verbal retaliation.

“I remember feeling ourselves closing in on something, something important, some unnamable thing like a jointer could straighten the boards upon which we walked.”

This is the first of several instances through the collection in which David/Dee uses the metaphor of a house to think about his family. This metaphor suggests that David thinks of his family as something crucial to his survival, but also something constructed—and in this case, constructed poorly. In this passage in which his mother articulates part of her trauma, David begins to see how dialogue can be a tool for righting his family’s misshaped bonds.

“When we were almost home, riding over the bridge to the Island, I sensed that even though their problems were their own, there was no escaping how those problems shaped us all, no escaping the end, like the way the ice melts in the river each spring, overflowing and creeping up the grassy banks and over lawns, reaching farther and farther toward the houses until finally the water touched stone, a gentleness before the river converged on the foundation.”

Toward the end of “Food for the Common Cold,” David develops the house-as-family metaphor to incorporate the notion of inherited trauma. The image of the river connotes an inevitability to this trauma: It keeps coming and cannot be turned away, and he is left to deal with the aftermath.

“I was seeing this girl—Tabitha, who I’d met at the clinic—and I stayed at her place in Overtown. One bedroom (always an unmade bed), one bath (makeup everywhere), tiny living room with blue walls (Christmas lights above the couch, even though Christmas was over), and a narrow kitchen (the brown cupboards never stayed shut).”

The syntax of this passage demonstrates the spiraling, obsessive nature of Dee’s thought patterns. The parenthetical criticisms of every aspect of Tabitha’s life suggest a fixation that Dee can’t work past when thinking about his relationship with her.

“Fellis took small steps. I watched his face, the one I’d seen each time his treatment ended. Droopy, but not like he was high or anything—etomidate was the anesthesia, and it was a nonbarbiturate since he was on methadone—but droopy and soft yet sharply focused, as if the electrical currents searing across his brain had awoken something, something that had rested for far too long and was now awake with a dedication to look through Fellis’s eyes and relay to the brain everything as pure sparkle and gold, even if what it was was only a cold waiting room with bland white walls and old magazines and me standing there scratching my ass while I waited for Fellis to get in the wheelchair.”

Talty is often spare in his descriptions of people and places throughout the collection, but in this passage he slows down and lingers on a particular moment. The detail about how Fellis looks and, by extension, how he might be feeling, communicates a deep empathy unusual for Dee, a desire to understand an experience that is, for the moment, outside of his own.

“On the riverbank, my knees in the mud, I tried to throw up but could not. It was in there—so much was deep down in there—but it would not come. I burped and gagged and burped, but only saliva dripped from my mouth, sending ripples through the river when it hit, making it harder to see in the brown water what I looked like.”

Here, David tries to vomit after his grandmother forces him to smoke many cigarettes. This passage is an example of how Talty allows descriptions of a character’s physicality to develop the heft of an emotional reaction. The offset independent clause (“so much was deep down in there”) hints at this physical reaction being about more than just David feeling poisoned by the cigarettes. He is also being affected the weight of the history his grandmother has projected onto him and forced him to confront.

“[R]ight then I realized that it was no longer the day Grammy made Robbie smoke all those cigarettes, but the day after. I never thought much of the hours between midnight and waking in the morning as being part of the next day. It had always felt like an in-between time, but there was no in-between. It was always now.”

In the stories leading to “The Blessing Tobacco,” David has had an indeterminate relationship to his familial and cultural histories. In this story, his grandmother’s delusions force him to decide how he will relate to these histories. The realization that “there was no in-between” reflects this shifting toward greater determinacy.

“Maybe that was how Great-Uncle Robbie had felt, like he had no choices, like no right way existed to fix anything at all.”

Dee’s reflection at the end of “The Blessing Tobacco” shows a newfound desire to connect with and understand his history. Here, the attempt to understand his grandmother’s past allows him to reflect on his own emotional state and articulate the feeling of Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma that has affected so much of his childhood but has, until this moment, not been something he can verbalize.

“She’s native, and she has trauma. So do I—I’m the one who saw it—but she thinks she has more. She doesn’t say that, but she thinks it. Maybe she’s right. Maybe older Natives have more trauma than younger ones.”

Dee reflects on intergenerational trauma. His supposition that older Natives “have more trauma” than younger Natives is open to different possible interpretations. It could be an optimistic statement—that the community heals slowly, across generations, and that the younger generations are not as traumatized as the ones that came before. It might also be an expression of the idea that the people in his community have gained trauma as they’ve aged, having to exist, as they do, in a society shaped by settler colonialism.

“If we’re built things, I wonder, then who builds us?”

Here, Dee develops the motif of families as houses when reflecting on a motivational poster that likens humans to ships. His reading of the metaphor suggests that he feels that some essential parts of a person’s being are created by external forces beyond their control.

“It drizzles, and halfway to the hospital I remember my dangling cigarette and the old man’s coffee, remember that I was supposed to bring it to him, and I’m thinking and thinking and thinking at sixty-five miles per hour on this smooth residential road, until an empty playground, the red swings rocking in the now-heavy rain, catches my attention, my breath, and when I snap forward and exhale my car clips a brown telephone pole and spirals onto a cracked concrete lot.”

Through most of the collection, Talty uses short, declarative sentences reflective of the way Dee/David’s speaks and thinks. This passage is an example of how Talty uses syntax not only to express Dee’s spiraling mindset but also to build momentum through the passage. The polysyndeton of this passage, coupled with the many nested clauses, don’t give the reader time to slow and process what’s happening.

“‘I would have smashed that guy’s head,’ JP said. ‘At least you broke the window. That counts for something.’

I lit another butt. ‘I feel so much lighter now that we sold someone.’”

JP’s comment here demonstrates the boys’ feelings about the necessity of violence as a means of retaliation. This is juxtaposed with David’s response, in which he notes the value of dialogue. David’s comment here suggests that he’s discovering a way of dealing with the violence and trauma that he’s internalizing in his childhood.

“It was all but dark out now. He cranked his flashlight once, twice—thirty times. He propped it up and in the lit space between us I saw our mess of crushed cans and cigarette butts and crumpled cellophanes and bum lighters and glass bottles.

How long had we been coming here?”

This passage demonstrates a shift in the quality of Dee’s thoughts. As Dee’s substance dependency increases, he begins to think more critically about why he’s in the situations he’s in, and how he might get out. The question posed at the end of this passage is an example of such reflection.

“When I sat down, my grandmother was smiling at me, smirking almost, like she knew the totality of my life, knew where I came from, where I was presently, and where I was going. And she kept on smirking at me, and then she nodded like she was agreeing on something, something about me—about where I was headed—and then she laughed and leaned forward and patted my kneed.

‘I had a brother…’ she started to say.”

Dee’s grandmother’s memory of her brother once again returns at a destabilizing moment for Dee, much as it did in “The Blessing Tobacco.” Dee fixates on the idea that his grandmother knows something of his future, but when she finally speaks, she’s only able to see in him the image of her dead brother. This surfaces the concept of Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma.

“Over my grandmother’s empty kitchen sink, I busted up the window frame and I pried it open and crawled inside, and I was crying not because I felt bad about doing it but because I didn’t feel good one bit.”

Dee’s articulation of what drives him to tears when breaking into his grandmother’s house initially appears contradictory. There are multiple valences of meaning, though, to the phrase “felt bad.” If the phrase is interpreted to connote guilt or remorse, it’s possible to read this statement as meaning that Dee is emotionally distraught because he doesn’t feel guilty about his actions when he knows that he should.

“Daryl’s body tensed and he screeched and cried. Fellis couldn’t see that Daryl’s body was crying out for help. Something that was Daryl, something that rarely communicated, was signing to me in a language I don’t know, like an earthquake speaking for the earth.”

As Dee gets older, there are more passages like these in which his language tends toward metaphor and abstraction as he searches to articulate feelings and ideas that are either new to him or were previously inarticulate. The “earthquake speaking for the earth” simile is especially evocative; it conjures the totality and extent of Daryl’s pain.

“Daryl could have done worse. Maybe that was why Fellis did what he did to Daryl—because Daryl could have done worse, since men can always do worse.”

Dee’s speculation about why Fellis acts as he does suggests that Dee doesn’t understand the masculine impulse toward violence, though he does sometimes partake in it. The observation that ends this quote recalls his mother’s cynicism about men in “Give Me Some Medicine.” This suggests that Dee has internalized his mother’s observations, or that his own experiences have led him to the same conclusion.

“I passed by a large boulder—rolled and placed back when the reservation was a burial ground. Couldn’t tell that to anyone, though, because people talked Pet Sematary. But it was true—this reservation was for the dead.”

This is one of the few instances of intertextuality that Talty employs in the collection. The reference to Stephen King’s racist use of “Indian burial grounds” as a plot device gives insight into how Dee thinks about the lens white communities use to conceptualize his history, family, and daily life.

“Wishing I’d never heard of Antiques Roadshow. Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn’t live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn’t make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time worth so little.”

Dee’s concise articulation of this paradox—that the people within his culture can be so devalued while the artifacts of their history are deemed significant—speaks to his own self-loathing and desire to leave behind the parts of himself that cause him pain, though these are inextricably tied to his identity.

“‘Tyson, if you don’t drop out this year you’ll be able to watch Smoke Signals twice in U.S. History.’ JP burped and went on. ‘Excuse me. You get to watch it the first time after you briefly cover the Trail of Tears and then again when you finish talking about our Settlement Act.’”

JP’s disparaging attitude speaks to the inauthenticity or lack of coverage Indigenous people see in media portrayals of their culture. Here, JP’s cynicism points to a broader problem: Why Penobscot youth might not find worth in an institution that they know misrepresents and disrespects them.