A kid from Spokane won the local spelling bee by spelling the word rhinoceros.
When I got back to the reservation, my family wasn’t surprised to see me. They’d been expecting me back since the day I left for Seattle. There’s an old Indian poet who said that Indians can reside in the city, but they can never live there. That’s as close to truth as any of us can get.
Mostly I watched television. For weeks I flipped through channels, searched for answers in the game shows and soap operas. My mother would circle the want ads in red and hand the paper to me.
“What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” I said, and normally, for almost any other Indian in the country, that would have been a perfectly fine answer. But I was special, a former college student, a smart kid. I was one of those Indians who was supposed to make it, to rise above the rest of the reservation like a fucking eagle or something. I was the new kind of warrior.
For a few months I didn’t even look at the want ads my mother circled, just left the newspaper where she had set it down. After a while, though, I got tired of television and started to play basketball again. I’d been a good player in high school, nearly great, and almost played at the college I attended for a couple years. But I’d been too out of shape from drinking and sadness to ever be good again. Still, I liked the way the ball felt in my hands and the way my feet felt inside my shoes.
At first I just shot baskets by myself. It was selfish, and I also wanted to learn the game again before I played against anybody else. Since I had been good before and embarrassed fellow tribal members, I knew they would want to take revenge on me. Forget about the cowboys versus Indians business. The most intense competition on any reservation is Indians versus Indians.
But on the night I was ready to play for real, there was this white guy at the gym, playing with all the Indians.
“Who is that?” I asked Jimmy Seyler.
“He’s the new BIA chief’s kid.”
“Can he play?”
“Oh, yeah.”
And he could play. He played Indian ball, fast and loose, better than all the Indians there.
“How long’s he been playing here?” I asked.
“Long enough.”
I stretched my muscles, and everybody watched me. All these Indians watched one of their old and dusty heroes. Even though I had played most of my ball at the white high school I went to, I was still all Indian, you know? I was Indian when it counted, and this BIA kid needed to be beaten by an Indian, any Indian.
I jumped into the game and played well for a little while. It felt good. I hit a few shots, grabbed a rebound or two, played enough defense to keep the other team honest. Then that white kid took over the game. He was too good. Later, he’d play college ball back East and would nearly make the Knicks team a couple years on. But we didn’t know any of that would happen. We just knew he was better that day and every other day.
The next morning I woke up tired and hungry, so I grabbed the want ads, found a job I wanted, and drove to Spokane to get it. I’ve been working at the high school exchange program ever since, typing and answering phones. Sometimes I wonder if the people on the other end of the line know that I’m Indian and if their voices would change if they did know.
One day I picked up the phone and it was her, calling from Seattle.
“I got your number from your mom,” she said. “I’m glad you’re working.”
“Yeah, nothing like a regular paycheck.”
“Are you drinking?”
“No, I’ve been on the wagon for almost a year.”
“Good.”
The connection was good. I could hear her breathing in the spaces between our words. How do you talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted you? How do you tell the difference between the two?
“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“Me, too.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked her and wished I had the answer for myself.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to change the world.”
These days, living alone in Spokane, I wish I lived closer to the river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump. I wish I could sleep. I put down my paper or book and turn off all the lights, lie quietly in the dark. It may take hours, even years, for me to sleep again. There’s nothing surprising or disappointing in that.
I know how all my dreams end anyway.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
THE TELEVISION WAS ALWAYS loud, too loud, until every conversation was distorted, fragmented.
“Dinner” sounded like “Leave me alone.”
“I love you” sounded like “Inertia.”
“Please” sounded like “Sacrifice.”
Believe me, the television was always too loud. At three in the morning I woke from ordinary nightmares to hear the television pounding the ceiling above my bed. Sometimes it was just white noise, the end of another broadcasting day. Other times it was a bad movie made worse by the late hour and interrupted sleep.
“Drop your weapons and come out with your hands above your head” sounded too much like “Trust me, the world is yours.”
“The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming!” sounded too much like “Just one more beer, sweetheart, and then we’ll go home.”
“Junior, I lost the money” sounded too much like “You’ll never have a dream come true.”
I don’t know where all the years went. I remember only the television in detail. All the other moments worth remembering became stories that changed with each telling, until nothing was aboriginal or recognizable.
For instance, in the summer of 1972 or 1973 or only in our minds, the reservation disappeared. I remember standing on the front porch of our HUD house, practicing on my plastic saxophone, when the reservation disappeared.
Finally, I remember thinking, but I was six years old, or seven. I don’t know for sure how old; I was Indian.
Just like that, there was nothing there beyond the bottom step. My older brother told me he’d give me a quarter if I jumped into the unknown. My twin sisters cried equal tears; their bicycles had been parked out by the pine trees, all of it vanished.
My mother came out to investigate the noise. She stared out past the bottom step for a long time, but there was no expression on her face when she went back to wash the potatoes.
My father was happily drunk and he stumbled off the bottom step before any of us could stop him. He came back years later with diabetes and a pocketful of quarters. The seeds in the cuffs of his pants dropped to the floor of our house and grew into orange trees.
“Nothing is possible without Vitamin C,” my mother told us, but I knew she meant to say, “Don’t want everything so much.”
Often the stories contain people who never existed before our collective imaginations created them.
My brother and I remember our sisters scraped all the food that dropped off our plates during dinner into a pile in the center of the table. Then they placed their teeth against the edge of the table and scraped all the food into their open mouths.
Our parents don’t remember that happening, and our sisters cry out, “No, no, we were never that hungry!”
Still, my brother and I cannot deny the truth of our story. We were there. Maybe hunger informs our lives.
My family tells me stories of myself, small events and catastrophic diseases I don’t remember but accept as the beginning of my story.
After surgery to relieve fluid pressure on my brain, I started to dance.
“No,” my mother tells me. “You had epileptic seizures.”
“No,” my father tells her. “He was dancing.”
During “The Tonight Show” I pretended sleep on the couch while my father sat in his chair and watched the television.
“It was Doc’s trumpet that made you dance,” my father told me.
“No, it was grand mal seizures punctuated by moments of extreme pe
rception,” my mother told him.
She wanted to believe I could see the future. She secretly knew the doctors had inserted another organ into my skull, transplanted a twentieth-century vision.
One winter she threw me outside in my underwear and refused to let me back into the house until I answered her questions.
“Will my children love me when I’m old?” she asked, but I knew she wanted to ask me, “Will I regret my life?”
Then there was music, scratched 45’s and eight-track tapes. We turned the volume too high for the speakers, until the music was tinny and distorted. But we danced, until my oldest sister tore her only pair of nylons and wept violently. But we danced, until we shook dust down from the ceiling and chased bats out of the attic into the daylight. But we danced, in our mismatched clothes and broken shoes. I wrote my name in Magic Marker on my shoes, my first name on the left toe and my last name on the right toe, with my true name somewhere in between. But we danced, with empty stomachs and nothing for dinner except sleep. All night we lay awake with sweat on our backs and blisters on our soles. All night we fought waking nightmares until sleep came with nightmares of its own. I remember the nightmare about the thin man in a big hat who took the Indian children away from their parents. He came with scissors to cut hair and a locked box to hide all the amputated braids. But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.
It was a dance.
Still, we can be surprised.
My sister told me she could recognize me by the smell of my clothes. She said she could close her eyes and pick me out of a crowd by just the smell of my shirt.
I knew she meant to say I love you.
With all the systems of measurements we had available, I remember the degree of sunlight most. It was there continuously, winter or summer. The cold came by accident, the sun by design.
Then there was the summer of sniffing gas. My sisters bent their heads at impossible angles to reach the gas tanks of BIA vehicles. Everything so bright and precise, it hurt the brain. Eardrums pounded by the slightest noise; a dog barking could change the shape of the earth.
I remember my brother stretched out over the lawnmower, his mouth pressed tightly to the mouth of the gas tank. It was a strange kiss, his first kiss, his lips burnt and clothes flammable. He tried to dance away, he named every blade of grass he crushed when he fell on his ass. Everything under water, like walking across the bottom of Benjamin Lake, past dead horses and abandoned tires. Legs tangled in seaweed, dance, dance again, kick the feet until you break free. Stare up at the surface, sunlight filtered through water like fingers, like a hand filled with the promise of love and oxygen. WARNING: Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents can be harmful or fatal.
How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I’ve been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding. Let’s say I remember sunlight as a measurement of this story, how it changed the shape of the family portrait. My father shields his eyes and makes his face a shadow. He could be anyone then, but my eyes are closed in the photo. I cannot remember what I was thinking. Maybe I wanted to stand, stretch my legs, raise my arms above my head, open my mouth wide, and fill my lungs. Breathe, breathe. Maybe my hair is so black it collects all the available light.
Suddenly it is winter and I’m trying to start the car.
“Give it more gas,” my father shouts from the house.
I put my foot to the fire wall, feel the engine shudder in response. My hands grip the steering wheel tightly. They are not mine this morning. These hands are too strong, too necessary for even the smallest gestures. I can make fists and throw my anger into walls and plasterboard. I can pick up a toothbrush or a pistol, touch the face of a woman I love. Years ago, these hands might have held the spear that held the salmon that held the dream of the tribe. Years ago, these hands might have touched the hands of the dark-skinned men who touched medicine and the magic of ordinary gods. Now, I put my hand to gearshift, my heart to the cold wind.
“Give it more gas,” my father yells.
I put the car into Drive and then I am gone, down the road, carefully, touching the brake like I touch my dreams. Once, my father and I drove this same road and he told the story of the first television he ever saw.
“The television was in the window of a store in Coeur d’Alene. Me and all the guys would walk down there and watch it. Just one channel and all it showed was a woman sitting on top of a television that showed the same woman sitting on top of the same television. Over and over until it hurt your eyes and head. That’s the way I remember it. And she was always singing some song. I think it was ‘A Girl on Top of the World.’”
This is how we find our history, how we sketch our family portrait, how we snap the photograph at the precise moment when someone’s mouth is open and ready to ask a question. How?
There is a girl on top of the world. She is owldancing with my father. That is the story by which we measure all our stories, until we understand that one story can never be all.
There is a girl on top of the world. She is singing the blues. That is the story by which we measure heartbreak. Maybe she is my sister or my other sister or my oldest sister dead in the house fire. Maybe she is my mother with her hands in the fry bread. Maybe she is my brother.
There is a girl on top of the world. She is telling us her story. That is the story by which we measure the beginning of all of our lives. Listen, listen, what can be calling? She is why we hold each other tight; she is why our fear refuses naming. She is the fancydancer; she is forgiveness.
The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution. We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer.
Jesus, we all want to survive.
SOMEBODY KEPT SAYING POWWOW
I KNEW NORMA BEFORE she ever met her husband-to-be, James Many Horses. I knew her back when there was good fry bread to be eaten at the powwow, before the old women died and took their recipes with them. That’s how it’s going. Sometimes it feels like our tribe is dying a piece of bread at a time. But Norma, she was always trying to save it, she was a cultural lifeguard, watching out for those of us that were so close to drowning.
She was really young, too, not all that much older than me, but everybody called her grandmother anyway, as a sign of respect.
“Hey, grandmother,” I said when she walked by me as I sat at another terrible fry bread stand.
“Hi, Junior,” she said and walked over to me. She shook my hand, loosely, like Indians do, using only her fingers. Not like those tight grips that white people use to prove something. She touched my hand like she was glad to see me, not like she wanted to break bones.
“Are you dancing this year?” I asked.
“Of course. Haven’t you been down to the dance hall?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you should go watch the dancing. It’s important.”
We talked for a while longer, told some stories, and then she went on about her powwow agenda. Everybody wanted to talk to Norma, to share some time with her. I just liked to sit with her, put my reservation antennas up and adjust my reception. Didn’t you know that Indians are born with two antennas that rise up and field emotional signals? Norma always said that Indians are the most sensitive people on the planet. For that matter, Indians are more sensitive than animals, too. We don’t just watch things happen. Watching automatically makes the watcher part of the happening. That’s what Norma taught me.
“Everything matters,” she said. “Even the little things.”
But it was m
ore than just some bullshit Native religion, some fodder for the crystal-happy. Norma lived her life like we should all do. She didn’t drink or smoke. But she could spend a night in the Powwow Tavern and dance hard. She could dance Indian and white. And that’s a mean feat, since the two methods of dancing are mutually exclusive. I’ve seen Indians who are champion fancydancers trip all over themselves when Paula Abdul is on the jukebox in the bar. And I’ve seen Indians who could do all this MTV Club dancing, electric slides and shit, all over the place and then look like a white person stumbling through the sawdust of a powwow.
One night I was in the Powwow Tavern and Norma asked me to dance. I’d never danced with her before, hadn’t really danced much at all, Indian or white.
“Move your ass,” she said. “This ain’t Browning, Montana. It’s Las Vegas.”
So I moved my ass, shook my skinny brown butt until the whole bar was laughing, which was good. Even if I was the one being laughed at. And Norma and I laughed all night long and danced together all night long. Most nights, before James Many Horses showed up, Norma would dance with everybody, not choosing any favorites. She was a diplomat. But she only danced with me that night. Believe me, it was an honor. After the bar closed, she even drove me home since everybody else was headed to parties and I wanted to go to sleep.
“Hey,” she said on the way home. “You can’t dance very good but you got the heart of a dancer.”
“Heart of the dancer,” I said. “And feet like the buffalo.”
And we laughed.
She dropped me at home, gave me a good night hug, and then drove on to her own HUD house. I went into my house and dreamed about her. Not like you think. I dreamed her a hundred years ago, riding bareback down on Little Falls Flats. Her hair was unbraided and she was yelling something to me as she rode closer to where I stood. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, though. But it was a dream and I listen to my dreams.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Page 16
