All My Relations by Christopher McIlroy

peeped through a keyhole to see a woman not undressing, but weeping.
    Wednesday morning we’re heating water, stirring coffee, bumping, “excuse me.” I slough about, genitals dangling irrelevantly, while Dooley tiptoes, spins, slings her hips, stretches over me to reach a light. Her nakedness chafes me like a shirt worn three days running. No matter how elaborate her excuses, the fact is she won’t take me. I won’t be able to please her.
    I feel a horrible dwindling at this. My complicity in our arrangement makes us both a little repulsive to me. I’m in danger of being a freak. I can’t see what more we have to do with each other.
    â€œI’ve got business,” I begin. “Your mother needs company.”
    Tears instantly fill Dooley’s eyes. “Anyone would appear unattractive under the scrutiny you’ve given me,” she says. “If you look at anything long enough, it becomes ugly. Try your own finger.” Gripped in her fist, it almost touches my nose. “What is it?” she asks. “An intestine? A bone?”
    Stunned at how deeply I’ve wounded her, I hold her tightly.I say, “You’ve got it wrong.” I propose a drive into the Canyon; pick her up at noon. Then, striding hard, I set out for the elementary school, trying to walk off the edgy boredom that’s set into me.
    I do need to schedule an AIS presentation for the elementary school faculty and staff. With 65 percent unemployment in Alav, they are virtually the only salaried inhabitants available. I find the principal surveying recess on the playground, arms folded. She greets me by humming “Goldfinger,” resonantly. My Precious Metals defeat apparently has made me her pet.
    Allotting me fifteen minutes during an employee picnic, after school tomorrow, the principal warns me that the gathering may be strange. The community is in mourning over the death of a great elder, a woman ninety-three years old. The tribe’s last traditional healer and storyteller, she had found no one to take her place. For the first time in centuries, no living person will carry on this knowledge.
    Head outthrust, knees pumping, Dooley bikes past the cyclone fence.
    The principal orders me to tour the school with her. Classrooms are throbbing but orderly. The resource library displays thirty bilingual texts she co-authored with the dead elder. “What remains of her wisdom is preserved here.” A history cover depicts the creation of the Hualapais from a reed in the Colorado. There’s even an Eden story, the ancestral home of Madwida Canyon, where perennial springs watered farms of squash and beans. White settlers, the principal says, didn’t credit the Hualapais with agriculture, and considered that proof of their low state. Having researched my clientele, I know that during the past century the tribe was almost exterminated by war, forced relocation, disease, starvation—a horrific downside and potentially divisive topic. Rather than turn the page, I ask the principal to read a line.
    Though the words look like the sounds of choking, her voice gurgles and swishes, water flowing over stones.
    I ask what she said.
    â€œYour chin is big for your face.” Laughing harshly, she tosses her head, peers sidelong to show it’s a joke.
    From the school parking lot I see Dooley inching up a rocky hill, standing straight on the pedals, wrenching the handlebars.
    When I leave the market with tonic mixer, she’s silhouetted on a ridgetop half a mile away, two wheels streaming hair.
    Dooley enters the car leg first, denim mini slit up the hip, white boots matching her vest, makeup to the roots of her hair. Slouched in cutoffs, I soak in a thermos of gin and tonic. The car noses between yellow rock turrets, the sky a hammered blue. As we descend, the geology grows more ancient. Canyons multiply, coiling into the distance, somewhere the strongholds where Hualapai bands fled the