by Lorrie Moore
That was to be expected, that they’d deny the whole thing. What I hadn’t expected was the voice in which the denial was said. The girl sounded as though her tongue were caught in her mouth. “That’s a BAD word!” the girl continued. “We don’t say BAD words!”
“Let’s go in,” Elise said.
“No,” Drema said. “I don’t want to. What if we get beat up?”
“Snot?” Elise turned to me, her flashlight blinding. It was the first time anyone had asked my opinion, though I knew they were just asking because they were afraid.
“I say we go inside, just to see what’s going on.”
“But Arnetta didn’t give us the signal,” Drema said. “She’s supposed to say, ‘We’re going to teach you a lesson,’ and I didn’t hear her say it.”
“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s just go in.”
We went inside. There we found the white girls, but about five girls were huddled up next to one big girl. I instantly knew she was the owner of the voice we’d heard. Arnetta and Octavia inched toward us as soon as we entered.
“Where’s Janice?” Elise asked, then we heard a flush. “Oh.”
“I think,” Octavia said, whispering to Elise, “they’re retarded.”
“We ARE NOT retarded!” the big girl said, though it was obvious that she was. That they all were. The girls around her began to whimper.
“They’re just pretending,” Arnetta said, trying to convince herself. “I know they are.”
Octavia turned to Arnetta. “Arnetta. Let’s just leave.”
Janice came out of a stall, happy and relieved, then she suddenly remembered her line, pointed to the big girl, and said, “We’re gonna teach you a lesson.”
“Shut up, Janice,” Octavia said, but her heart was not in it. Arnetta’s face was set in a lost, deep scowl. Octavia turned to the big girl, and said loudly, slowly, as if they were all deaf, “We’re going to leave. It was nice meeting you, okay? You don’t have to tell anyone that we were here. Okay?”
“Why not?” said the big girl, like a taunt. When she spoke, her lips did not meet, her mouth did not close. Her tongue grazed the roof of her mouth, like a little pink fish. “You’ll get in trouble. I know. I know.”
Arnetta got back her old cunning. “If you said anything, then you’d be a tattletale.”
The girl looked sad for a moment, then perked up quickly. A flash of genius crossed her face: “I like tattletale.”
“It’s all right, girls. It’s gonna be all right!” the 909 troop leader said. It was as though someone had instructed all of Troop 909 to cry at once. The troop leader had girls under her arm, and all the rest of the girls crowded about her. It reminded me of a hog I’d seen on a field trip, where all the little hogs would gather about the mother at feeding time, latching on to her teats. The 909 troop leader had come into the bathroom shortly after the big girl threatened to tell. Then the ranger came, then, once the ranger had radioed the station, Mrs. Margolin arrived with Daphne in tow.
The ranger had left the restroom area, but everyone else was huddled just outside, swatting mosquitoes.
“Oh. They will apologize,” Mrs. Margolin said to the 909 troop leader, but Mrs. Margolin said this so angrily, I knew she was speaking more to us than to the other troop leader. “When their parents find out, every one a them will be on punishment.”
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” the 909 troop leader reassured Mrs. Margolin. Her voice lilted in the same way it had when addressing the girls. She smiled the whole time she talked. She was like one of those TV cooking show women who talk and dice onions and smile all at the same time.
“See. It could have happened. I’m not calling your girls fibbers or anything.” She shook her head ferociously from side to side, her Egyptian-style pageboy flapping against her cheeks like heavy drapes. “It could have happened, see. Our girls are not retarded. They are delayed learners.” She said this in a syrupy instructional voice, as though our troop might be delayed learners as well. “We’re from the Decatur Children’s Academy. Many of them just have special needs.”
“Now we won’t be able to walk to the bathroom by ourselves!” the big girl said.
“Yes you will,” the troop leader said, “but maybe we’ll wait till we get back to Decatur—”
“I don’t want to wait!” the girl said. “I want my Independence patch!”
The girls in my troop were entirely speechless. Arnetta looked as though she were soon to be tortured but was determined not to appear weak. Mrs. Margolin pursed her lips solemnly and said, “Bless them, Lord. Bless them.”
In contrast, the Troop 909 leader was full of words and energy. “Some of our girls are echolalic—” She smiled and happily presented one of the girls hanging on to her, but the girl widened her eyes in horror and violently withdrew herself from the center of attention, as though she sensed she were being sacrificed for the village sins. “Echolalic,” the troop leader continued. “That means they will say whatever they hear, like an echo—that’s where the word comes from. It comes from ‘echo.’” She ducked her head apologetically. “I mean, not all of them have the most progressive of parents, so if they heard a bad word they might have repeated it. But I guarantee it would not have been intentional.”
Arnetta spoke. “I saw her say the word. I heard her.” She pointed to a small girl, smaller than any of us, wearing an oversized T-shirt that read: EAT BERTHA’S MUSSELS.
The troop leader shook her head and smiled. “That’s impossible. She doesn’t speak. She can, but she doesn’t.”
Arnetta furrowed her brow. “No. It wasn’t her. That’s right. It was her.”
The girl Arnetta pointed to grinned as though she’d been paid a compliment. She was the only one from either troop actually wearing a full uniform: the mocha-colored A-line shift, the orange ascot, the sash covered with patches, though all the same one—the Try-It patch. She took a few steps toward Arnetta and made a grand sweeping gesture toward the sash. “See,” she said, full of self-importance, “I’m a Brownie.” I had a hard time imagining this girl calling anyone a “nigger”; the girl looked perpetually delighted, as though she would have cuddled up with a grizzly if someone had let her.
On the fourth morning, we boarded the bus to go home.
The previous day had been spent building miniature churches from Popsicle sticks. We hardly left the cabin. Mrs. Margolin and Mrs. Hedy guarded us so closely, almost no one talked for the entire day.
Even on the day of departure from Camp Crescendo, all was serious and silent. The bus ride began quietly enough. Arnetta had to sit beside Mrs. Margolin, Octavia had to sit beside her mother. I sat beside Daphne, who gave me her prize journal without a word of explanation.
“You don’t want it?”
She shook her head no. It was empty.
Then Mrs. Hedy began to weep. “Octavia,” Mrs. Hedy said to her daughter without looking at her, “I’m going to sit with Mrs. Margolin. All right?”
Arnetta exchanged seats with Mrs. Hedy. With the two women up front, Elise felt it safe to speak. “Hey,” she said, then she set her face into a placid vacant stare, trying to imitate that of a Troop 909 girl. Emboldened, Arnetta made a gesture of mock pride toward an imaginary sash, the way the girl in full uniform had done. Then they all made a game of it, trying to do the most exaggerated imitations of the Troop 909 girls, all without speaking, all without laughing loud enough to catch the women’s attention.
Daphne looked at her shoes, white with sneaker polish. I opened the journal she’d given me. I looked out the window, trying to decide what to write, searching for lines, but nothing could compare with the lines Daphne had written, “My father, the veteran,” my favorite line of all time. The line replayed itself in my head, and I gave up trying to write.
By then, it seemed as though the rest of the troop had given up making fun of the 909 girls. They were now quietly gossiping about who had passed notes to whom in school. For a moment the gossiping fell off,
and all I heard was the hum of the bus as we sped down the road and the muffled sounds of Mrs. Hedy and Mrs. Margolin talking about serious things.
“You know,” Octavia whispered, “why did we have to be stuck at a camp with retarded girls? You know?”
“You know why,” Arnetta answered. She narrowed her eyes like a cat. “My mama and I were in the mall in Buckhead, and this white lady just kept looking at us. I mean, like we were foreign or something. Like we were from China.”
“What did the woman say?” Elise asked.
“Nothing,” Arnetta said. “She didn’t say nothing.”
A few girls quietly nodded their heads.
“There was this time,” I said, “when my father and I were in the mall and—”
“Oh, shut up, Snot,” Octavia said.
I stared at Octavia, then rolled my eyes from her to the window. As I watched the trees blur, I wanted nothing more than to be through with it all: the bus ride, the troop, school—all of it. But we were going home. I’d see the same girls in school the next day. We were on a bus, and there was nowhere else to go.
“Go on, Laurel,” Daphne said to me. It was the first time she’d spoken the whole trip, and she’d said my name. I turned to her and smiled weakly so as not to cry, hoping she’d remember when I’d tried to be her friend, thinking maybe that her gift of the journal was an invitation of friendship. But she didn’t smile back. All she said was, “What happened?”
I studied the girls, waiting for Octavia to tell me to “shut up” again before I even had a chance to utter another word, but everyone was amazed that Daphne had spoken. I gathered my voice. “Well,” I said. “My father and I were in this mall, but I was the one doing the staring.” I stopped and glanced from face to face. I continued. “There were these white people dressed like Puritans or something, but they weren’t Puritans. They were Mennonites. They’re these people who, if you ask them to do a favor, like paint your porch or something, they have to do it. It’s in their rules.”
“That sucks,” someone said.
“C’mon,” Arnetta said. “You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
“How do you know that’s not just some story someone made up?” Elise asked, her head cocked, full of daring. “I mean, who’s gonna do whatever you ask?”
“It’s not made up. I know because when I was looking at them, my father said, ‘See those people. If you ask them to do something, they’ll do it. Anything you want.’”
No one would call anyone’s father a liar. Then they’d have to fight the person, but Drema parsed her words carefully. “How does your father know that’s not just some story? Huh?”
“Because,” I said, “he went up to the man and asked him would he paint our porch, and the man said, ‘Yes.’ It’s their religion.”
“Man, I’m glad I’m a Baptist,” Elise said, shaking her head in sympathy for the Mennonites.
“So did the guy do it?” Drema asked, scooting closer to hear if the story got juicy.
“Yeah,” I said. “His whole family was with him. My dad drove them to our house. They all painted our porch. The woman and girl were in bonnets and long, long skirts with buttons up to their necks. The guy wore this weird hat and these huge suspenders.”
“Why,” Arnetta asked archly, as though she didn’t believe a word, “would someone pick a porch? If they’ll do anything, why not make them paint the whole house? Why not ask for a hundred bucks?”
I thought about it, and I remembered the words my father had said about them painting our porch, though I had never seemed to think about his words after he’d said them.
“He said,” I began, only then understanding the words as they uncoiled from my mouth, “it was the only time he’d have a white man on his knees doing something for a black man for free.”
I remembered the Mennonites bending like Daphne had bent, cleaning the restroom. I remembered the dark blue of their bonnets, the black of their shoes. They painted the porch as though scrubbing a floor. I was already trembling before Daphne asked quietly, “Did he thank them?”
I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees. “No,” I said, and suddenly knew there was something mean in the world that I could not stop.
Arnetta laughed. “If I asked them to take off their long skirts and bonnets and put on some jeans, they would do it?”
And Daphne’s voice—quiet, steady: “Maybe they would. Just to be nice.”
2004
SHERMAN ALEXIE
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
from The New Yorker
A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, SHERMAN ALEXIE (b. 1966) was raised in Washington on the Spokane Indian Reservation. He said, “My mom and dad met when he moved to the rez, when he was five and she was fourteen. And she helped him get a drink at a water fountain. My mom was born in the house where her mom was born. So we were as isolated in the sense of Native Americans as anybody else. So, you know, I realized later on that when I left the rez to go to the White high school on the border of the rez I was a first-generation immigrant, you know? I’m an indigenous immigrant.”
Alexie has published twenty-four books, including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Blasphemy, New and Selected Stories, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a novel for children. He has received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Citation for Best First Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
Alexie’s work tells of reservation life and American pop culture and combines irony with moments of surrealism. He is also known for his humor: “Humor in the face of incredible epic pain. I mean, Jewish folks invented American comedy . . . They have this incredible cultural power. And in a way, I wish that was us. In a way, that could have easily been us. You know? Indians with our storytelling and artistic ability could have created Hollywood. We could have created American comedy. So in some ways, we’re the yin and yang of the American genocidal coin.”
★
Noon
One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.
I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy. Of course, crazy is not the official definition of my mental problem, but I don’t think asocial disorder fits it, either, because that makes me sound like I’m a serial killer or something. I’ve never hurt another human being, or, at least, not physically. I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, too. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. And I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. I’ve been disappearing ever since.
I’ve been homeless for six years now. If there’s such a thing as an effective homeless man, then I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience store managers who let me use their bathrooms. And I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden behind the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of this, but it means a lot to me, being trustworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.
Probably none of this interests you. Homeless Indians are everywhere in Sea
ttle. We’re common and boring, and you walk right on by us, with maybe a look of anger or disgust or even sadness at the terrible fate of the noble savage. But we have dreams and families. I’m friends with a homeless Plains Indian man whose son is the editor of a big-time newspaper back east. Of course, that’s his story, but we Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmakers, so maybe that Plains Indian hobo is just a plain old everyday Indian. I’m kind of suspicious of him, because he identifies himself only as Plains Indian, a generic term, and not by a specific tribe. When I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me exactly what he is, he said, “Do any of us know exactly what we are?” Yeah, great, a philosophizing Indian. “Hey,” I said, “you got to have a home to be that homely.” He just laughed and flipped me the eagle and walked away.
I wander the streets with a regular crew—my teammates, my defenders, my posse. It’s Rose of Sharon, Junior, and me. We matter to one another if we don’t matter to anybody else. Rose of Sharon is a big woman, about seven feet tall if you’re measuring overall effect and about five feet tall if you’re only talking about the physical. She’s a Yakama Indian of the Wishram variety. Junior is a Colville, but there are about 199 tribes that make up the Colville, so he could be anything. He’s good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public service advertisement. He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian. I am living proof of the horrible damage that colonialism has done to us Skins. But I’m not going to let you know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways. I’m a strong man, and I know that silence is the best method of dealing with white folks.
