Free All My Relations by Christopher McIlroy Page A

He’s white.” Through the LDS-sponsored Placement Program, Dooley had grown up with a Mormon foster family for seven years. Summers she’d return to the rez. The dentist still helped with college expenses. “Dad was the drunk. He’s deceased. He was half Chinese. See? I eat Chinese and then brush my teeth.”
    I put my arm around Dooley and she leans close, breathing warmly on my hand. Drunkenness, like a big pat on the back, is sprawling me forward. My fingers play with the powerful features of Dooley’s face, knobs and planes. I want to twist them off and keep them, but leave the face intact.
    The motel where I’m staying is ten miles out of town. As I shut the car door, darkness billows around us. Dooley vanishes, replaced by a velvet intimacy. I pull her to me. Her tongue is fat and abandoned in my mouth. I caress her entire body, between her legs. “Go inside,” I’m mouthing.
    â€œI am not prepared for sexual intercourse,” Dooley says.
    O.K. Controlling my breath, I nod. Mormon thing?
    â€œI can’t remember when a man touched me as freely as you just did.”
    One habit I don’t have is flattering myself. I can sense right away she has no use for the men in this town—no one’s fault,incompatible backgrounds. And then there’s the mumbling old lady with the awful slack eyes. A woman in these circumstances could fall for Son of Sam if he came from somewhere else and was going back there.
    Meanwhile, we’re inside. I’m pulling the light cord over the kitchenette, the cupboards that welcoming yellow of stained pine, and it’s as if we’re married, coming in off a long day’s haul on the road, but it’s vacation and every motel is our new home. Dooley and I stand under the light, kissing tenderly.
    It seems I must have traveled cross-country with my family, cozying down in cheap, clean motels like this one, with tufted spreads and bars of light that rumbled across the walls with passing trucks. And I’m confused. I don’t know if I’m the child whose shoes are about to be shaken into the wastebasket or if it’s my own children I’m steadying on the bed as I loosen their snaps, roll down their socks.
    But my mom cut out when I was five, and my dad ran an office machine repair year-round, so we didn’t take trips, and I’ve never married.
    Dooley surprises me, stripping completely for bed. Jackknifing, she whisks off her underpants, lean, muscular body bent like a hunting bow, the only softness her shuddering breasts.
    She has these nervous caresses, as if she’s straightening seat covers on her way out of the house. By now I’m on the faded side of the drunk, feeling like a cardboard cutout alone in a gray room. “So why the hell don’t we just fuck?” I say, and she buzzes on about an eleven-month marriage, a white undergrad, sanctity of the marriage bed. “Pop is very strong in the Church,” she says. She tells me, “My husband despised me because I am a nonwhite.” I’m set in cardboard and her hand just rasps.
    Morning I’m parched and rank, tremors jiggling my hands and feet. Dooley rubs me down.
    We don’t dress for breakfast, or all day. The drawn curtainskeep a perpetual twilight. I’m aware that Dooley is offering her nakedness as a gift, her walk studied, experimentally nonchalant, her eyes flitting to the mirror. Opening the refrigerator, she poses prettily, hand on hip. Playing cards she squats on the bed, thighs spread wide.
    The presence of her flesh draws my hangover like a salve. We talk, look out the window, deal gin rummy, eat, lie down. It’s a normal day. Politely we maneuver around each other. I stroke Dooley’s body appreciatively in passing, and she smiles.
    At 6 P.M . I have an appointment with AIS’s sole client in Alav, the elementary school principal. Chukka-chuk reggae guitar rings through the aluminum walls