100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  This whole story really started at lunchtime, when Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I were panning the handle down at Pike Place Market. After about two hours of negotiating, we earned five dollars—good enough for a bottle of fortified courage from the most beautiful 7-Eleven in the world. So we headed over that way, feeling like warrior drunks, and we walked past this pawnshop I’d never noticed before. And that was strange, because we Indians have built-in pawnshop radar. But the strangest thing of all was the old powwow-dance regalia I saw hanging in the window.

  “That’s my grandmother’s regalia,” I said to Rose of Sharon and Junior.

  “How you know for sure?” Junior asked.

  I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever. I’d only seen photographs of my grandmother dancing in it. And those were taken before somebody stole it from her, fifty years ago. But it sure looked like my memory of it, and it had all the same color feathers and beads that my family sewed into our powwow regalia.

  “There’s only one way to know for sure,” I said.

  So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the old white man working behind the counter.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “That’s my grandmother’s powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Somebody stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been searching for it ever since.”

  The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops are filled with liars.

  “I’m not lying,” I said. “Ask my friends here. They’ll tell you.”

  “He’s the most honest Indian I know,” Rose of Sharon said.

  “All right, honest Indian,” the pawnbroker said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Can you prove it’s your grandmother’s regalia?”

  Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on our regalia. But we always hid it so that you had to search really hard to find it.

  “If it really is my grandmother’s,” I said, “there will be one yellow bead hidden somewhere on it.”

  “All right, then,” the pawnbroker said. “Let’s take a look.”

  He pulled the regalia out of the window, laid it down on the glass counter, and we searched for that yellow bead and found it hidden beneath the armpit.

  “There it is,” the pawnbroker said. He didn’t sound surprised. “You were right. This is your grandmother’s regalia.”

  “It’s been missing for fifty years,” Junior said.

  “Hey, Junior,” I said. “It’s my family’s story. Let me tell it.”

  “All right,” he said. “I apologize. You go ahead.”

  “It’s been missing for fifty years,” I said.

  “That’s his family’s sad story,” Rose of Sharon said. “Are you going to give it back to him?”

  “That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t just give away a thousand dollars.”

  “We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.

  “Hey,” I said to her. “Don’t go threatening people.”

  The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking about the possibilities.

  “Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said.”

  He sounded sad about that. As if he was sorry for taking advantage of our disadvantages.

  “What’s your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.

  “Jackson,” I said.

  “Is that first or last?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, it’s true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jackson. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family is funny.”

  “All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a thousand dollars, would you?”

  “We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” he said, and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar. That would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”

  “We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.

  “That’s too bad,” he said once more, and thought harder about the possibilities. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow with the money and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds all right,” I said.

  “All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here’s twenty bucks.”

  He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. And Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.

  1 P.M.

  Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7-Eleven and bought three bottles of imagination. We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in only one day. Thinking hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off those bottles—one, two, and three.

  2 P.M.

  Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke up. I heard later that she had hitchhiked back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.

  Junior had passed out beside me and was covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else’s vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him alone and walked down to the water. I love the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.

  When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins, who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen north ever since.

  These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back.

  “How long has your boat been gone?” I asked.

  “Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said.

  I cried with them for a while.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?”

  They didn’t.

  3 P.M.

  I walked back to Junior. He was still out cold. I put my face down near his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was alive, so I dug around in his blue jeans pockets and found half a cigarette. I smoked it all the way down and thought about my grandmother.

  Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. My father always thought Agnes caught her tumors from the uranium mine on the reservation. But my mother said the disease started when Agnes was walking back from a powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She broke three ribs, and my mother always said those ribs never healed right, and tumors take over when you don’t heal right.

  Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and the salt and the vomit, I wondered if my grandmother’s cancer started when somebody stole her powwow regalia. Maybe the cancer started in her broken heart and then leaked out into her breasts. I know it’s crazy, but I wondered whether I could bring my grandmother back to life if I bought back her regalia.

  I needed money, big money, so I left Junior and walked over to the Real Change office.

  4 P.M.

  Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, supports cultural projects that empower
the poor and the homeless, and mobilizes the public around poverty issues. Real Change’s mission is to organize, educate, and build alliances to create solutions to homelessness and poverty. It exists to provide a voice for poor people in our community.

  I memorized Real Change’s mission statement because I sometimes sell the newspaper on the streets. But you have to stay sober to sell it, and I’m not always good at staying sober. Anybody can sell the paper. You buy each copy for thirty cents and sell it for a dollar, and you keep the profit.

  “I need one thousand four hundred and thirty papers,” I said to the Big Boss.

  “That’s a strange number,” he said. “And that’s a lot of papers.”

  “I need them.”

  The Big Boss pulled out his calculator and did the math.

  “It will cost you four hundred and twenty-nine dollars for that many,” he said.

  “If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t need to sell the papers.”

  “What’s going on, Jackson-to-the-Second-Power?” he asked. He is the only person who calls me that. He’s a funny and kind man.

  I told him about my grandmother’s powwow regalia and how much money I needed in order to buy it back.

  “We should call the police,” he said.

  “I don’t want to do that,” I said. “It’s a quest now. I need to win it back by myself.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And, to be honest, I’d give you the papers to sell if I thought it would work. But the record for the most papers sold in one day by one vender is only three hundred and two.”

  “That would net me about two hundred bucks,” I said.

  The Big Boss used his calculator. “Two hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents,” he said.

  “That’s not enough,” I said.

  “And the most money anybody has made in one day is five hundred and twenty-five. And that’s because somebody gave Old Blue five hundred-dollar bills for some dang reason. The average daily net is about thirty dollars.”

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “No.”

  “Can you lend me some money?”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “If I lend you money, I have to lend money to everybody.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I’ll give you fifty papers for free. But don’t tell anybody I did it.”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  He gathered up the newspapers and handed them to me. I held them to my chest. He hugged me. I carried the newspapers back toward the water.

  5 P.M.

  Back on the wharf, I stood near the Bainbridge Island Terminal and tried to sell papers to business commuters boarding the ferry.

  I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five in a garbage can, and walked into McDonald’s, ordered four cheeseburgers for a dollar each, and slowly ate them.

  After eating, I walked outside and vomited on the sidewalk. I hated to lose my food so soon after eating it. As an alcoholic Indian with a busted stomach, I always hope I can keep enough food in me to stay alive.

  6 P.M.

  With one dollar in my pocket, I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out, and I put my ear to his chest and listened for his heartbeat. He was alive, so I took off his shoes and socks and found one dollar in his left sock and fifty cents in his right sock.

  With two dollars and fifty cents in my hand, I sat beside Junior and thought about my grandmother and her stories.

  When I was thirteen, my grandmother told me a story about the Second World War. She was a nurse at a military hospital in Sydney, Australia. For two years, she healed and comforted American and Australian soldiers.

  One day, she tended to a wounded Maori soldier, who had lost his legs to an artillery attack. He was very dark-skinned. His hair was black and curly and his eyes were black and warm. His face was covered with bright tattoos.

  “Are you Maori?” he asked my grandmother.

  “No,” she said. “I’m Spokane Indian. From the United States.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I have heard of your tribes. But you are the first American Indian I have ever met.”

  “There’s a lot of Indian soldiers fighting for the United States,” she said. “I have a brother fighting in Germany, and I lost another brother on Okinawa.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I was on Okinawa as well. It was terrible.”

  “I am sorry about your legs,” my grandmother said.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What’s funny?”

  “How we brown people are killing other brown people so white people will remain free.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Well, sometimes I think of it that way. And other times I think of it the way they want me to think of it. I get confused.”

  She fed him morphine.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” he asked.

  “Which heaven?” she asked.

  “I’m talking about the heaven where my legs are waiting for me.”

  They laughed.

  “Of course,” he said, “my legs will probably run away from me when I get to heaven. And how will I ever catch them?”

  “You have to get your arms strong,” my grandmother said. “So you can run on your hands.”

  They laughed again.

  Sitting beside Junior, I laughed at the memory of my grandmother’s story. I put my hand close to Junior’s mouth to make sure he was still breathing. Yes, Junior was alive, so I took my two dollars and fifty cents and walked to the Korean grocery store in Pioneer Square.

  7 P.M.

  At the Korean grocery store, I bought a fifty-cent cigar and two scratch lottery tickets for a dollar each. The maximum cash prize was five hundred dollars a ticket. If I won both, I would have enough money to buy back the regalia.

  I loved Mary, the young Korean woman who worked the register. She was the daughter of the owners, and she sang all day.

  “I love you,” I said when I handed her the money.

  “You always say you love me,” she said.

  “That’s because I will always love you.”

  “You are a sentimental fool.”

  “I’m a romantic old man.”

  “Too old for me.”

  “I know I’m too old for you, but I can dream.”

  “O.K.,” she said. “I agree to be a part of your dreams, but I will only hold your hand in your dreams. No kissing and no sex. Not even in your dreams.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “No sex. Just romance.”

  “Goodbye, Jackson Jackson, my love. I will see you soon.”

  I left the store, walked over to Occidental Park, sat on a bench, and smoked my cigar all the way down.

  Ten minutes after I finished the cigar, I scratched my first lottery ticket and won nothing. I could win only five hundred dollars now, and that would be only half of what I needed.

  Ten minutes after I lost, I scratched the other ticket and won a free ticket—a small consolation and one more chance to win some money.

  I walked back to Mary.

  “Jackson Jackson,” she said. “Have you come back to claim my heart?”

  “I won a free ticket,” I said.

  “Just like a man,” she said. “You love money and power more than you love me.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “And I’m sorry it’s true.”

  She gave me another scratch ticket, and I took it outside. I like to scratch my tickets in private. Hopeful and sad, I scratched that third ticket and won real money. I carried it back inside to Mary.

  “I won a hundred dollars,” I said.

  She examined the ticket and laughed.

  “That’s a fortune,” she said, and counted out five twenties. Our fingertips touched as she handed me the money. I felt electric and constant.

  “Thank you,” I said, and gave her one of the bills.

  “I can’t take that,” she said. “It’s your money.”

  “No, it�
�s tribal. It’s an Indian thing. When you win, you’re supposed to share with your family.”

  “I’m not your family.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  She smiled. She kept the money. With eighty dollars in my pocket, I said goodbye to my dear Mary and walked out into the cold night air.

  8 P.M.

  I wanted to share the good news with Junior. I walked back to him, but he was gone. I heard later that he had hitchhiked down to Portland, Oregon, and died of exposure in an alley behind the Hilton Hotel.

  9 P.M.

  Lonesome for Indians, I carried my eighty dollars over to Big Heart’s in South Downtown. Big Heart’s is an all-Indian bar. Nobody knows how or why Indians migrate to one bar and turn it into an official Indian bar. But Big Heart’s has been an Indian bar for twenty-three years. It used to be way up on Aurora Avenue, but a crazy Lummi Indian burned that one down, and the owners moved to the new location, a few blocks south of Safeco Field.

  I walked into Big Heart’s and counted fifteen Indians—eight men and seven women. I didn’t know any of them, but Indians like to belong, so we all pretended to be cousins.

  “How much for whiskey shots?” I asked the bartender, a fat white guy.

  “You want the bad stuff or the badder stuff?”

  “As bad as you got.”

  “One dollar a shot.”

  I laid my eighty dollars on the bar top.

  “All right,” I said. “Me and all my cousins here are going to be drinking eighty shots. How many is that apiece?”

  “Counting you,” a woman shouted from behind me, “that’s five shots for everybody.”

  I turned to look at her. She was a chubby and pale Indian woman, sitting with a tall and skinny Indian man.

  “All right, math genius,” I said to her, and then shouted for the whole bar to hear. “Five drinks for everybody!”

  All the other Indians rushed the bar, but I sat with the mathematician and her skinny friend. We took our time with our whiskey shots.

  “What’s your tribe?” I asked.

  “I’m Duwamish,” she said. “And he’s Crow.”