Dogland | Page 8

around him, when he says, 'Mark. You, Mark Nix. You afraid to face me?'
"Now, this fellow was big, a Swede farmer with shoulders that you get from working fourteen hours a day when work needs to be done. Being afraid of him seemed like a perfectly natural thing to me, and probably to your Grandpa Wade, too. I don't know if Mark was afraid, or if he just felt funny having this happen in front of his pa and his little brother. There wasn't much Mark could do but shake his head and say, 'No, Carl, I'm not afraid of you.'
"The Swede grins and says, 'All right, then. You and me, right here, right now.' And he begins to roll up his sleeves.
"Mark says, 'She said she wasn't your girl anymore.'
"The Swede kind of loses his grin and looks real mean. He says, 'You chickening out, Nix?'
"Mark looks at Pa and looks at me and says to the Swede, 'If you want, I'll meet you tonight at the Nitehawk.'
"The Swede says, 'Why should I wait up all night when you're right here?'
"Now, by this time, there's a few people inside the store listening, and there's a couple more on the sidewalk, and we're blocking the doorway, even though everyone around is more interested in whether there'll be a fight than in getting past us. Mark's kind of blushing, 'cause he knows everyone's going to be talking about this, no matter what he does.
"'Hell,' the Swede says, real disgusted. 'You're yellow, Nix. Little yellow prettyboy. Come on, I'll give you the first blow. Hit me, if you're man enough." He sticks out his chin. "I dare you. Hit me."
"Mark looks at your grandpa, and your grandpa just says, 'Well, son, hit the man.'"
Pa would laugh and repeat that: "'Well, son, hit the man.'" And then the story would end the way it had to: "So Mark cold-cocks him, right there. One punch to the chin and the Swede's on the ground, wondering what train went over him. One punch. Your grandpa says, 'Come on, son,' and we went about our business. They were helping that poor Swede out of the store as we left." Pa would shake his head and grin then. "One punch."
Uncle Mark joined the Army Air Corps when the U.S. went to war. Pa, too young to join the Army, became a radio operator in the Merchant Marine. One day at sea, he learned that Uncle Mark had been shot down over Italy. A week later, he overheard a radio report that a ship carrying thousands of American bodies back from Europe had been sunk. The news never reached the public.
The U.S. government buried a coffin and set up a tombstone with my name on it at the military graveyard on the outskirts of Minneapolis. None of the Nix family traveled to the funeral. A few weeks after the funeral, Bette and Wade Nix received an American flag in exchange for their son.
If Pa was bitter about the end of Uncle Mark's story, I never heard that. I heard pride when he said that Uncle Mark and his copilot stayed in the plane until everyone else had parachuted safely, and then it was too late for them to bail out, too. What followed after that was just the way the story ended, no different than Custer at the Little Big Horn or the charge of the Light Brigade.
Ma told stories of our past, too, when she drove and Pa rested. Hers tended to be quiet, afternoon tales. Mystery and violence were usually replaced with humor, but sometimes the grim things lurked in the corners of Ma's stories, outside the telling and making themselves known by their shadows, where none of us saw them unless we looked.
What should have been the best story of all was, in Ma's telling, a simple statement of fact: We were related to General George Armstrong Custer through Grandma Letitia, who had been born a Kuster with a K, a cousin or a second-cousin of his, or perhaps they'd come from the same German village centuries before. The details didn't matter. One of America's most famous heroes was one of ours, even if Ma had nothing to say about his life or death. Pa did his part to enrich this simple detail for Digger, Little Bit, and me by pointing out that our Indian blood meant we had ancestors on both sides of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, among its losers and its winners.
I don't remember any of Ma's stories about Grandpa Abner. Ma loved him, and so did we, because he was a happy man who was always finding ways to make us laugh. Maybe because of that, we didn't need any stories about him. He was the druggist in Rosecroix,