TALKING HANDS, BLUE EYES, by Evan Morgan Williams

He was not sure which question frightened him more. Would he tell her? Would she listen? Yet, as he sat by himself in the bustling cafe (on the Indian side) and waited for his cousin to finish her shift, he felt confident that he knew the answer to either question, and he formed the sign for yes (right hand extended, fingers wrapped closed except the index finger, poised, then delicately dropped, captured by the thumb). He was worried enough to feel sweat on his palms; he foresaw a failure not of words – he had abandoned them long ago in favor of the hand-talking that was his birthright – but of the very silence he wanted to convey. Would she, by his measured silence, discern his capacity for anguish, and for joy?
He was drinking his coffee too fast. He caught her eyes as she worked the aisle, topping off mugs of coffee for the other customers. He pointed at his mug. She shook her head.
He considered her his closest friend. He was not sure that she felt the same way. But she knew how to sign, and he felt a tangible bond to her, a firm grip on a happiness he struggled to conceptualize because, he was certain, it lacked a sign for itself. He would find one. Never would he entrust that idea to slippery words again.
He listened to the chatter in the café – the gossip of Crow women, the lewd jokes of truckers, the money worries of ranchers, and the small talk that filled the uneasy spans of silence – listened to people hemmed by their words – and imagined himself free of it. He imagined himself wordlessly negotiating the tab with his cousin, pictured the single sign that would suffice – good trade (left hand touching right hand, fingers closed, knuckles meeting, then pulling apart as though tightening a rope, firming a bond) – and felt in his heart the good knowing that would pass between himself and her: that the meal was good, that the price was fair, that this black-haired boy and this pretty, black-haired girl could share in this simple knowing. Why, he asked himself, had he ever bothered to talk when he could so readily avail himself of the precise locutions of his hands?
He watched her carry a plate of fries and soda-pops to a table of Crow girls from school (scheming about boys), watched her banter with her uncles in their regular booth (teasing her), watched her polish the squeaky glass case by the register, the case where the owner let her sell a few pieces of her quillwork to tourists (Is this genuine? Did you make this yourself?). The owner had asked for fifty percent; she had argued him down to twenty-five. To argue (right hand closed, in front of mouth, tip of index finger under thumb; hand moving forward, thumb releasing index finger in a flicking gesture – people spitting words at each other in this aggressive way). He watched her fix her hair in the little mirror behind the register, smooth her smock, and scurry around the end of the counter to take a fresh order. She was seventeen.
He would take her into his confidence.
He tipped back his coffee mug for the last drop and turned to his book, a reprint of William P. Clark’s The Indian Sign Language. Inside, he found a good sign. Joy (bring the right hand away from the heart, fluttering). He had seen the old men use that sign when they passed each other in front of the grocery in Crow Agency, so familiar to each other that they had nothing left to say but joy. He had seen the players on the high-school basketball team from Lodge Grass use that sign before a game; it was the last thing they said to each other before setting to the task of demolishing the other team. We share joy, we know that we do, and since the joy is in the knowing, let us speak no further of it. He would use that sign, and she would understand.
She came to his table and wrote something on a ticket.
He lifted his coffee mug, and with his other hand he pressed open the book, his finger marking the spot for joy.
Cousin, you can’t take up this booth all night. She placed his ticket on the table and turned. She wore a quillwork clasp, flat and perfect, in her shiny black hair.

* * *

She would only sign with him when they were alone. One afternoon last summer, he had been unloading bags of feed from her uncle’s pickup (he had just earned his driver’s license), and she came out to the barn with glasses of lemonade, and they sat on the tailgate and signed until their older cousins saw them and teased! He put his hands in his pockets. He worked the rest of the afternoon angry and alone. The teasing seemed a pathetic flaw in the language. He would have welcomed anyone to join in the signs; she was the only one who had offered. But even she had wandered off with the other cousins, to tease them back, and to gather porcupine quills.

* * *

He stacked his cup and spoon on the saucer and closed his book. He paid without speaking and left the café. He would hitch back to Crow Agency – would walk mostly. He would walk because hardly any cars strayed down the old road since the interstate highway had been built. He would walk because most people had stopped picking up the sixteen-year old boy who had stopped talking a long time ago.
He had walked about two miles of road, and the lights of the diner faded behind him, and the lights of the Crow housing tract glowed on the skyline ahead. He tucked the book of signs under his arm and stuck his hands in his pockets for warmth. From behind, he heard the hum of a motor. A pickup pulled up. It was her. She leaned over and shoved open the passenger door. She was wearing her orange high-school cheerleader jacket over her pink waitress smock. He shook his head.
Cousin, get in. I’ll take you home.

* * *

One Saturday afternoon in November, when his act seemed to him less a way of reaching and more a withdrawal, he put down his book of signs and left his parents’ boxy reservation bungalow. He exited through the back door, hurdled the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the housing tract, and cut across the grassland. After he had walked about a mile, the fences stopped hemming his thoughts, and the rolling grasslands seemed to extend without boundary. He began to sign. He winced at the irony: there was no one to sign to. But it was good practice, for speed and precision (he had been teased for stuttering), but also for automaticity, a mingling of thought and gesture that he held vital.
As he practiced, he considered how to explain his silence to others. How to clarify his intent by declaring nothing at all. He thought about teachers and cousins and friends. He thought about white people. He did not want to seem superior or aloof, which silence often said. He anticipated ridicule. His act smacked of elitism and contradiction: how would these arcane signs bring him closer to anyone? He needed an accomplice. He needed his cousin.
He pondered what he would actually say to her.
School would be his largest obstacle. Not because he never saw the girl (though that was true: she sat with her girlfriends on the bus, took advanced art classes, studied in the library, cheered for the basketball team, flirted with boys and preened with girls), but because speaking was integral to school life. He hated speaking, stammering, knotting his fingers, staring at his hands. In speech class, he had heard his voice on tape: he sounded ugly and ashamed. Speaking set up distance. His awkward, fumbfumbling words imparted a shade of meaning: Listen, I am too anxious to speak openly. By his deprecations he obscured his message, as a child might stash a toy when an adult approached to inquire. His speech was effective only when he was silent, when his silence said, What I feel is too sacred to be spoken – maybe we could just touch. But that was not the sort of message anyone heard, because who was listening for that sort of thing?
Across the hills, a slow Montana sunset seeped red and orange across the southwest sky. Hands in his pockets, the boy turned for home, retracing his steps through the flattened grass. Sundown (both hands out, fingers pointed upward, palms facing; let the hands collapse together, emptying the space where once you held the day within your hands.

* * *

He had learned signing from an elder. He was thirteen at the time. A picnic by the river. His friends had run off to chase a porcupine through the brush and gather the quills for the girls. The old man shuffled up to him and gestured to a picnic bench. The boy assented to this; he did not feel singled out; he understood that it was his day to learn, and that on another day it would be a different child, a different lesson. He sat with the old man and listened.
The elder spoke English poorly, and the boy spoke Crow equally badly. At a loss for words, the elder retreated to the eloquence of his practiced, arthritic hands. He spoke not at all, just motioned this way and that, while around them people talked and drank soda-pop, and off a ways the children yelled as they threw a towel over a porcupine to snag its quills. The silence between the elder and the boy lent an immediacy to the boy’s grasp of the signs. Like this sign (hand at his side, fingers open, fluttering). He never learned what it meant. He only knew how to use it, to face his cousin (for she too had been taken aside one day and guided through the signs) and say There is something satisfying in seeing you, when I turn your way, or when you turn my way. He couldn’t say what it meant. He only knew it was good.
He borrowed the William Clark lexicon from the library in Billings, and he studied the old people at picnics and basketball games. He renounced small talk, the numbing, conformist banter that occupied the space between himself and his family, his friends, his teachers. He sensed, in the newfound silence, a vastness and calm, a truth worth keeping unbroken. And, though he would not have thought so at the time, he withdrew.

* * *

She was a year older, a cousin by marriage. She may have had a little white in her, because she was very small and had luminous blue eyes, traits for which she was endlessly teased. He and she were the youngest children in a family of aunties and uncles and cousins who for sixteen years had meddled and teased and precisely planned their marriage and the names of their children, placed bets on the color of their children’s eyes. He felt smothered and determined. But he liked her, and he wondered how to let her know without seeming to have bent to his family’s expectations.
She waitressed, made good grades, led cheers at the basketball games, wove flattened porcupine quills into pretty designs, and extended to him her kindness, her patience, and bits of her limited time. Early one evening, she gave him an hour, and they played pool at the billiard hall in town.
It was before eight o’clock (when the manager would kick out the high-schoolers and start selling beer). Fifty cents per game. One dollar for a soda-pop. Business (busy-ness, frantic effort). He replaced that notion with a simple crossing of index fingers, exchange, goods passing from one person to the other.
She reminded him that they could only play for an hour, and they shot pool without speaking further. The clack of billiard balls gave him something to hold onto, and he might have run the table if, on his final shot, he had not been distracted by her in his sightline. Her hand rested on the edge of the felt; she wore a quilled bracelet, so loose that it had slipped halfway off her hand; when she raised her arm to drink from her soda-pop, the bracelet slid to her elbow. He wore a quilled belt-buckle that she had made for him last Christmas. Um, here, my auntie wants me to give this to you. Gift (right hand, palm open, extended from your chest). Receive (right hand, palm open and cupped, brought toward your chest). Her equivocal words aside, he could not remember feeling more grateful for anything.
Clack! He fired and missed.
Her quilled bracelet slipped back down her hand when she leaned over to shoot.
He walked her out to her pickup. She allowed him to put his arm around her. She signed, It’s nice to be with you because you’re quiet and I don’t have to say anything. In response, the most he dared to say, he told her he wanted to look into her eyes without looking away, and that this would be enough. Substantive talk, meaningful talk of gravity and depth (right hand in front of mouth, palm upward, cupped as though to water, then extended outward, an offering of words; cupped hand returned to mouth, taking in the other person’s words as though sipping water, sustenance).
Trust (fingers upward, palm outward, so that even the Great Spirit could see there was no blood on his hand). That was a good sign. She would know he was incapable of guile. He placed his palm against hers.
He had learned that there were no lies (two fingers flicked away from your mouth, talking with two tongues), that lying was inconceivable, that every construction on their hands must speak the truth. He felt the press of her palm against his.
Cousin, I have to go. But thank you (knuckles together, pulled taught, firming the bond).

* * *

His friends at school lost patience with him. They shrugged and shook their heads and walked away. He became a loner. Touched. Stay away from him. He endured taunts as he walked down the hall: a white student would raise his palm and say How! like one of those Hollywood Indians. The student would laugh and high-five his friends.

* * *

For as long as stories went back, the Indians of the Plains had communicated with signs. It was a language of preference, not disability. Precise, complete, and efficacious, the signs were common to all the tribes. Enemies who otherwise killed each other would lay down their knives to sign. It was the language of killers who had chosen not to kill for a day. When enemies charged each other, counted coup, when they lacerated each other’s bodies, stole each other’s children, torched each other’s grasslands, called each other dogs and snakes, he surmised they had been speaking aloud. When they traded tobacco, quills, ponies, when they gathered pipestone, when they reunited children with their families, he surmised that the negotiations had passed in signs. The signs made for trust; enemies could talk to each other for a few hours. Nowadays, on the reservation, people still used the signs when quiet was called for. The signs made him proud to be Crow.

* * *

One day at school, a group of white boys from town jumped him in the bathroom, took his lexicon, and dumped it in the toilet. To take (a kind of grabbing motion). He considered it not an act of intimidation – for it only strengthened his resolve – nor of racism – for his purpose would not be distracted by smallmindedness – but an act of censorship. In this aspect, though, the boys failed; doubled over on the tile floor, he flipped them off as they were leaving the bathroom.

* * *

He baffled his teachers. His grades fell. He relished discarding the useless jargon they wanted him to employ.
We have some concerns about your progress.
He let those words go, finding no equivalents for them. He couldn’t translate them if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to.
Please, they said, you need to talk.
Don’t ask me to do that. The symbols stumbled in his hands as if tangled in the strings of a marionette.
In the principal’s office, seated at the conference table, wedged among a council of adults (his teachers, his parents, a school psychologist, all fixed upright in their chairs) he was given a chance to explain himself. He began with the sign for trust.
Oh for goodness sake!
Will you sit up please.
We’re here for your benefit, you know.
His appeal was dismissed. His reticence hardened, and his purpose and conviction clarified.

* * *

He consented to remedial study with the girl, after school, before she went to her cheerleading practice. Together they sat in the library and labored through his assignments, finding ways to modernize the signs, building from an ancient lexicon of animals and plants and the passing of seasons picturesque analogs for technology and science and math. They rendered abstractions as tangible as stones. Perpendicular: as a prairie falcon turns. Exemplary: a good arrow chosen from many. Commitment: palms touching, with trust.
Mostly, though, he delighted at how simply he could render meaning: yes. The motion was as delicate as the light descent of his index finger into a bowl of water. Plop! At the café, he had once seen two tourists communicating in the sign language of the deaf: how frantic and rushed they seemed. The effort merely to watch had exhausted him. What he and the girl elaborated was subtle, deliberate, and something more. As often as not, they completed each other’s thoughts. Soon, the slightest turn of his hand conveyed the finest notion, as a simple ribbon might secure an elegant gift. Good (right hand, open palm downward, extended from the chest). It meant You and I know this is level with our hearts. It implied, more than anything else, complicity, a bond he was keen to retain.
One frozen winter afternoon, he chose to walk home after studying. She had even kissed him lightly on the cheek before heading to practice! He was pleased with his silence. He wanted a sign for how far he had come. He was pondering how to put together the ideas of casting away and something new blossoming in its place; he saw an early lupine forcing itself from the cold earth, and he nodded at this. Blue flower in winter. It was an elegant solution. (His grasp of the elusive meaning was securely enunciated in the firm snatch of his hand, insight captured from the air like a stray aspen leaf on the wind.)

* * *

In his bedroom, he kept things spare. To keep his focus. Aside from his bed and lamp and dresser, he kept books and photocopies from the library in Billings. Garrick Mallery’s 1880 monograph to the Bureau of American Ethnology (strange signs he had never seen on the reservation – he wondered whether Mallery’s informants were pulling his leg). The reprint of Captain Clark’s definitive 1884 lexicon (before it was stolen at school). Tomkins’s 1928 guide for Boy Scouts and camp counselors. He was ambivalent about using books by and for white men, but they were comprehensive, and he wished to be as thorough. Besides, the silent knowing that passed between himself and the girl wasn’t in any of the books. It was safe. Any Indian would understand that.

* * *

By the end of his junior year, his silence was consummate. He was tolerated by teachers and classmates and cousins, indulged, ignored. His signs took on the gentleness and grace of tai chi. He studied with the girl in the library after school, played billiards with her on Saturdays, labored with her at her uncle’s farm, and he delighted in the effortlessness with which clear thought became expression, as if thought and expression were the same, the very gesture becoming its own intent. The boy and the girl had not spoken a word to each other in nine months, and maybe it was because of their silence that, one day, she signed to him that she was happy. He knew that he was.
He turned seventeen. He met her at the diner, and during a break in her shift she scooted beside him in the booth. She brought him chocolate cake. He touched her shoulder and expressed remorse at ever having tried to speak at all. Before, words had been like bricks, a wall between them. Now, with his hands, he was taking the wall down, gesture by gesture, each brick coming down. Across the wall he began to see her face, her striking blue eyes. He wondered why it had taken so long to come to this.
Her eyes followed his hands as he carved the shapes of his feelings, describing them in arcs before her face. He molded meaning with his hands, as a potter shapes a mound of clay into a bowl, which he gave to her, palm open, a gift.
The signs made for a critical honesty, and his feelings flourished unencumbered. Before, he had crammed his feelings into prefabricated words. The words had loomed over him like dialogue balloons in a comic strip, reducing the grace of his life to silliness. Not anymore. He left the meanings open: This could mean many things, and if we are truly friends we already know what it means: embrace. He gave the sign to her this way, bringing his hands to his chest, imagining how it would feel to hold her. Listen, I want to hold you, let me draw you near. This she understood. Thereafter the simplest gestures sufficed. They sat together without speaking. The silence between them became the sign, and the less he spoke the more articulate he became. He called it gesture speech. It was the gesture speech in the sense of physical motion (which, with an added increment of effort, would be dancing), but also in the sense of giving away a part of himself. The language assumed a touching vulnerability. He signed to her I’m doing this for you. You know that. He watched her reply, her index finger poised, and the delicate drop.
Um, cousin, I want to show you something. She unfolded a letter. She had won a scholarship to the Indian art academy in Santa Fe. She would be gone for a year. She did not look at him.

* * *

He worked for her uncle, that summer, shifting horses among the different fields, trying not to think about the letter and the ending it implied. She turned eighteen. She took extra hours at the diner and saved the money for Santa Fe. Some evenings during August, when the first flocks of geese touched down in the brown grass, he lingered at her uncle’s farm and waited for her to return from work. They sat on the hood of her pickup and soaked up the warmth as the engine creaked and cooled. One night, she signed to him a bawdy story about two lovers. There was no sign for shame. There didn’t need to be.
He said nothing. Stay, don’t go, just sit with me here: punctuating the remark with his right hand in a fist, brought down with a forcefulness that startled him.
One evening, a trio of cousins gaggled up from the river, gorged with laughter. They carried a beach towel studded with porcupine quills. They plucked the quills from the towel, waved them towards the boy and the girl, and laughed. But quills hurt if you held them long, so they threw them in the grass. The boy hopped down from the pickup, retrieved the quills one by one, gripping them like straws.
Baby Blues Eyes, we’re going into town. Come with us!
It’s after eight o’clock, the girl said.
Like they ever check for ID. Come on! You too, Little Cousin.
The boy said nothing.
Little Cousin, have you lost your voice? Why are you so depressed? Come with us! They tugged his arm.
He waved his hand as though brushing away a wasp. No.
They whispered to the girl and pointed at the boy. They clambered into one of the uncle’s cars and drove towards town.
He was glad they were gone. He felt at peace in the silence he and the girl shared as easily as bread. He stepped towards her and brushed her arm. Into her left hand he carefully placed the sheaf of porcupine quills. He closed her fingers around them.
She hopped off the hood and took the quills inside. When she came back out, she was wearing bluejeans and a white blouse. She was brushing her hair. At first he did not understand that she was going into town. The gentle strokes of the brush through her silky hair caught his eye and distracted him from the sign that, if he had seen it, would have felt like betrayal. Doubt, uncertainty (right hand to heart, two fingers open, wrist twisting back and forth). Cousin, I am of two hearts.
Then she spoke. I don’t know, it does sound kinda fun. They’re our cousins, after all. Besides, I’m leaving in a week. Come with us, Cousin! We can shoot pool.
He saw what was happening, and he forgave her immediately. Signing was a language of openness and trust and generosity, yet he had used it to forge an exclusive, proprietary bond. He felt possessive and ashamed. He imagined her in Santa Fe. No one would know the signs there. Gallery owners and dealers, deft in the sly jargon of commerce, would jostle words to get a piece of her (a blue-eyed Indian girl!) There would be fine-printed contracts to sign. Adrift and alone, she would miss her family on the reservation, and she would try to call on the phone. Would he be too proud to speak to her?
Flailing for the right word, he tried to sign an apology, but she took his hands into hers and gripped them firmly. Hush. He allowed this, realizing that in his hands he could hold meaning no more than smoke. It was a language to be discarded because it could not properly express why it had failed, and it had failed because there was no sign for capturing her, because capturing her was impossible. He closed his eyes, and exactly in this blackness and pain saw how easy, how necessary, discarding the signs would be.
He knew that she understood when she, sensing the tension leave his hands, let go.
He watched her drive into town.

* * *

Across the billiard hall he saw her white-bloused figure leaning over a table. She was lining up a shot. Her black hair spilled onto the green felt surface. She wore a bracelet of shiny porcupine quills dyed pink and yellow, and the bracelet slid down her hand. As he walked to the rack and selected a cue, he imagined her working at a bench, her fingers pressing flat the quills, twisting and knotting them into colorful patterns for bracelets, buckles, hair clasps, pendants, and a dozen other pieces of jewelry. He wondered if she considered these movements a kind of conversation. As she looked up from the pool table and met his eyes and smiled, he realized that he had never asked.

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Evan Morgan Williams’s stories have appeared in The Portland Review, Northwest Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Best of the West 5.