Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “My father did it,” he said. “First time, I was maybe seven, and I dropped my orange juice on the kitchen floor, and he slapped me on the side of my head. Knocked me out. Woke up, my ear swollen and all bloody and funny-color bruised. You know what I said to my mom? I told her my ear had a black eye.

  “Yeah, my mom knew my dad hit me,” he said. “She never did anything about it. But that’s okay. Nobody else did anything about it, either.

  “Dad kept hitting the same ear,” he said. “He kept hitting me whenever he was pissed. And he was pissed all the time. Hit me maybe fifty times over the years.

  “It’s my right ear,” he said, “because my dad was left-handed.

  “Last time he hit me was the night I graduated from high school,” he said. “He was drunk and kept pushing at me. Kept asking me if I thought I was too good for him now. Kept saying I thought I’d taken a shit on the moon. And then I told him I was going to community college and he hit me. But I was bigger than I used to be. Same size as him. And I was younger and sober. So, yeah, I just kicked his ass out the front door and onto the lawn. Had an audience after a while.

  “And nobody stopped me, either,” Mike said. “Not my mom. Not even Pastor Arnold. Because they all knew for years that dad was beating on me, and none of them did a thing to stop him. And now I was getting revenge. And they were okay with that. All they could do was call the ambulance after I was done.

  “Got five years for manslaughter,” he said. “Out early for good behavior. Got my bachelor’s degree in education. I want to teach high school. But no way in hell they’ll let an ex-con teach in a real school. No way they’ll let me teach white kids. So I moved back to the rez. Back in with my mother.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “she asks me why I had to kill him. She still misses him.

  “And sometimes,” he said, “she rubs this lotion on my ear. It’s some miracle medicine that’s supposed to make scars go away. I don’t tell her that shit might have worked when I was ten, but it ain’t going to work now. This ear is going to look like this forever.

  “And, yeah,” Mike said, “prison was horrible at first. I got scars way deep inside. But things got better as soon as the other Indians realized I was Indian, too. They saw my blond hair and blue eyes, you know, and thought I was just another Aryan. The real Aryans thought I was one of them, too. But I speak my tribal language, man, and I play drum and sing. So I just walked up to the Indians gathered in the prison yard. And I clapped my hands together like a drum and I sang a powwow song, northern style, maybe a little too fast because I was nervous.

  “And, man, oh, man,” he said. “Did those Indians laugh and cheer and war-whoop it up when I was done. And this one elder, with these long, gray braids and about ten thousand tattoos, he calls for quiet. And all these hard-ass Indians shut up because they respect the elder. And he says to me and everybody else, he says, the Creator has gifted us with a half-breed who can sing full-blood.

  “So Full-Blood became my prison name,” Mike said. “Funny as shit, right? A blond Indian named Full-Blood. And, let me tell you, I sang ten thousand songs in prison, even sang for the governor, this tiny white woman, when she came to visit.

  “Before I sang, she asked me what crime I’d committed,” he said. “And that’s a question you don’t ask or answer in prison. But I figure, Hey, she’s the Governor, so I tell her the truth. I tell her I manslaughtered my father. That I punched him to death because he punched me for years. And the governor leans in close to me, so close I could feel her breath on my ear, and she says, she says, she says, Good for you.

  “Can you believe that shit?” Mike asked. “I couldn’t even respond. But let me tell you this. If they ever let ex-cons vote, I’m going to vote for that governor. I’ll vote for her no matter what she’s running for. You see? I finally understand this damn country. I finally know who should lead us. It’s got to be somebody who is equal parts revenge and forgiveness. Somebody who is equal parts love and blood.

  “Do you know what I mean?” Mike asked. “Please tell me you know what I mean.”

  THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD

  Being a Spokane Indian, I only pick up Indian hitchhikers.

  I learned this particular ceremony from my father, a Coeur d’Alene, who always stopped for those twentieth-century aboriginal nomads who refused to believe the salmon were gone. I don’t know what they believed in exactly, but they wore hope like a bright shirt.

  My father never taught me about hope. Instead, he continually told me that our salmon—our hope—would never come back, and though such lessons may seem cruel, I know enough to cover my heart in any crowd of white people.

  “They’ll kill you if they get the chance,” my father said. “Love you or hate you, white people will shoot you in the heart. Even after all these years, they’ll still smell the salmon on you, the dead salmon, and that will make white people dangerous.”

  All of us, Indian and white, are haunted by salmon.

  When I was a boy, I leaned over the edge of one dam or another—perhaps Long Lake or Little Falls or the great gray dragon known as the Grand Coulee—and watched the ghosts of the salmon rise from the water to the sky and become constellations.

  For most Indians, stars are nothing more than white tombstones scattered across a dark graveyard.

  But the Indian hitchhikers my father picked up refused to admit the existence of sky, let alone the possibility that salmon might be stars. They were common people who believed only in the thumb and the foot. My father envied those simple Indian hitchhikers. He wanted to change their minds about salmon; he wanted to break open their hearts and see the future in their blood. He loved them.

  In 1975 or ’76 or ’77, driving along one highway or another, my father would point out a hitchhiker standing beside the road a mile or two in the distance.

  “Indian,” he said if it was an Indian, and he was never wrong, though I could never tell if the distant figure was male or female, let alone Indian or not.

  If a distant figure happened to be white, my father would drive by without comment.

  That was how I learned to be silent in the presence of white people.

  The silence is not about hate or pain or fear. Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times. Perhaps a thousand white families are still waiting for their sons and daughters to return home, and can’t recognize them when they float back as morning fog.

  “We better stop,” my mother said from the passenger seat. She was one of those Spokane women who always wore a purple bandanna tied tightly around her head.

  These days, her bandanna is usually red. There are reasons, motives, traditions behind the choice of color, but my mother keeps them secret.

  “Make room,” my father said to my siblings and me as we sat on the floor in the cavernous passenger area of our blue van. We sat on carpet samples because my father had torn out the seats in a sober rage not long after he bought the van from a crazy white man.

  I have three brothers and three sisters now. Back then, I had four of each. I missed one of the funerals and cried myself sick during the other one.

  “Make room,” my father said again—he said everything twice—and only then did we scramble to make space for the Indian hitchhiker.

  Of course, it was easy enough to make room for one hitchhiker, but Indians usually travel in packs. Once or twice, we picked up entire all-Indian basketball teams, along with their coaches, girlfriends, and cousins. Fifteen, twenty Indian strangers squeezed into the back of a blue van with nine wide-eyed Indian kids.

  Back in those days, I loved the smell of Indians, and of Indian hitchhikers in particular. They were usually in some stage of drunkenness, often in need of soap and a towel, and always ready to sing.

  Oh, the songs! Indian blues bellowed at the highest volumes. We called them “49s,” those cross-cultural songs that combined Indian lyrics and rhythms with country-and-western and
blues melodies. It seemed that every Indian knew all the lyrics to every Hank Williams song ever recorded. Hank was our Jesus, Patsy Cline was our Virgin Mary, and Freddy Fender, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, Tanya Tucker, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, Donna Fargo, and Charlie Rich were our disciples.

  We all know that nostalgia is dangerous, but I remember those days with a clear conscience. Of course, we live in different days now, and there aren’t as many Indian hitchhikers as there used to be.

  Now, I drive my own car, a 1998 Toyota Camry, the best-selling automobile in the United States, and therefore the one most often stolen. Consumer Reports has named it the most reliable family sedan for sixteen years running, and I believe it.

  In my Camry, I pick up three or four Indian hitchhikers a week. Mostly men. They’re usually headed home, back to their reservations or somewhere close to their reservations. Indians hardly ever travel in a straight line, so a Crow Indian might hitchhike west when his reservation is back east in Montana. He has some people to see in Seattle, he might explain if I ever asked him. But I never ask Indians their reasons for hitchhiking. All that matters is this: They are Indians walking, raising their thumbs, and I am there to pick them up.

  At the newspaper where I work, my fellow reporters think I’m crazy to pick up hitchhikers. They’re all white and never stop to pick up anybody, let alone an Indian. After all, we’re the ones who write the stories and headlines: hitchhiker kills husband and wife, missing girl’s body found, rapist strikes again. If I really tried, maybe I could explain to them why I pick up any Indian, but who wants to try? Instead, if they ask I just give them a smile and turn back to my computer. My coworkers smile back and laugh loudly. They’re always laughing loudly at me, at one another, at themselves, at goofy typos in the newspapers, at the idea of hitchhikers.

  I dated one of them for a few months. Cindy. She covered the local courts: speeding tickets and divorces, drunk driving and embezzlement. Cindy firmly believed in the who-what-where-when-why-and-how of journalism. In daily conversation, she talked like she was writing the lead of her latest story. Hell, she talked like that in bed.

  “How does that feel?” I asked, quite possibly the only Indian man who has ever asked that question.

  “I love it when you touch me there,” she answered. “But it would help if you rubbed it about thirty percent lighter and with your thumb instead of your middle finger. And could you maybe turn the radio to a different station? KYZY would be good. I feel like soft jazz will work better for me right now. A minor chord, a C or G-flat, or something like that. Okay, honey?”

  During lovemaking, I would get so exhausted by the size of her erotic vocabulary that I would fall asleep before my orgasm, continue pumping away as if I were awake, and then regain consciousness with a sudden start when I finally did come, more out of reflex than passion.

  Don’t get me wrong. Cindy is a good one, cute and smart, funny as hell, a good catch no matter how you define it, but she was also one of those white women who date only brown-skinned guys. Indians like me, black dudes, Mexicans, even a few Iranians. I started to feel like a trophy, or like one of those entries in a personal ad. I asked Cindy why she never dated pale boys.

  “White guys bore me,” she said. “All they want to talk about is their fathers.”

  “What do brown guys talk about?” I asked her.

  “Their mothers,” she said and laughed, then promptly left me for a public defender who was half Japanese and half African, a combination that left Cindy dizzy with the interracial possibilities.

  Since Cindy, I haven’t dated anyone. I live in my studio apartment with the ghosts of two dogs, Felix and Oscar, and a laptop computer stuffed with bad poems, the aborted halves of three novels, and some three-paragraph personality pieces I wrote for the newspaper.

  I’m a features writer, and an Indian at that, so I get all the shit jobs. Not the dangerous shit jobs or the monotonous shit jobs. No. I get to write the articles designed to please the eye, ear, and heart. And there is no journalism more soul-endangering to write than journalism that aims to please.

  So it was with reluctance that I climbed into my car last week and headed down Highway 2 to write some damn pleasant story about some damn pleasant people. Then I saw the Indian hitchhiker standing beside the road. He looked the way Indian hitchhikers usually look. Long, straggly black hair. Brown eyes and skin. Missing a couple of teeth. A bad complexion that used to be much worse. Crooked nose that had been broken more than once. Big, misshapen ears. A few whiskers masquerading as a mustache. Even before he climbed into my car I could tell he was tough. He had some serious muscles that threatened to rip through his blue jeans and denim jacket. When he was in the car, I could see his hands up close, and they told his whole story. His fingers were twisted into weird, permanent shapes, and his knuckles were covered with layers of scar tissue.

  “Jeez,” I said. “You’re a fighter, enit?”

  I threw in the “enit,” a reservation colloquialism, because I wanted the fighter to know that I had grown up on the rez, in the woods, with every Indian in the world.

  The hitchhiker looked down at his hands, flexed them into fists. I could tell it hurt him to do that.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a fighter.”

  I pulled back onto the highway, looking over my shoulder to check my blind spot.

  “What tribe are you?” I asked him, inverting the last two words in order to sound as aboriginal as possible.

  “Lummi,” he said. “What about you?”

  “Spokane.”

  “I know some Spokanes. Haven’t seen them in a long time.”

  He clutched his backpack in his lap like he didn’t want to let it go for anything. He reached inside a pocket and pulled out a piece of deer jerky. I recognized it by the smell.

  “Want some?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  It had been a long time since I’d eaten jerky. The salt, the gamy taste. I felt as Indian as Indian gets, driving down the road in a fast car, chewing on jerky, talking to an indigenous fighter.

  “Where you headed?” I asked.

  “Home. Back to the rez.”

  I nodded my head as I passed a big truck. The driver gave us a smile as we went by. I tooted the horn.

  “Big truck,” said the fighter.

  I haven’t lived on my reservation for twelve years. But I live in Spokane, which is only an hour’s drive from the rez. Still, I hardly ever go home. I don’t know why not. I don’t think about it much, I guess, but my mom and dad still live in the same house where I grew up. My brothers and sisters, too. The ghosts of my two dead siblings share an apartment in the converted high school. It’s just a local call from Spokane to the rez, so I talk to all of them once or twice a week. Smoke signals courtesy of U.S. West Communications. Sometimes they call me up to talk about the stories they’ve seen that I’ve written for the newspaper. Pet pigs and support groups and science fairs. Once in a while, I used to fill in for the obituaries writer when she was sick. Then she died, and I had to write her obituary.

  “How far are you going?” asked the fighter, meaning how much closer was he going to get to his reservation than he was now.

  “Up to Wenatchee,” I said. “I’ve got some people to interview there.”

  “Interview? What for?”

  “I’m a reporter. I work for the newspaper.”

  “No,” said the fighter, looking at me like I was stupid for thinking he was stupid. “I mean, what’s the story about?”

  “Oh, not much. There’s two sets of twins who work for the fire department. Human-interest stuff, you know?”

  “Two sets of twins, enit? That’s weird.”

  He offered me more deer jerky, but I was too thirsty from the salty meat, so I offered him a Pepsi instead.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said.

  “They’re in a cooler on the backseat,” I said. “Grab me one, too.”

>   He maneuvered his backpack carefully and found room enough to reach into the backseat for the soda pop. He opened my can first and handed it to me. A friendly gesture for a stranger. I took a big mouthful and hiccupped loudly.

  “That always happens to me when I drink cold things,” he said.

  We sipped slowly after that. I kept my eyes on the road while he stared out the window into the wheat fields. We were quiet for many miles.

  “Who do you fight?” I asked as we passed through another anonymous small town.

  “Mostly Indians,” he said. “Money fights, you know? I go from rez to rez, fighting the best they have. Winner takes all.”

  “Jeez, I never heard of that.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s illegal.”

  He rubbed his hands together. I could see fresh wounds.

  “Man,” I said. “Those fights must be rough.”

  The fighter stared out the window. I watched him for a little too long and almost drove off the road. Car horns sounded all around us.

  “Jeez,” the fighter said. “Close one, enit?”

  “Close enough,” I said.

  He hugged his backpack more tightly, using it as a barrier between his chest and the dashboard. An Indian hitchhiker’s version of a passenger-side air bag.

  “Who’d you fight last?” I asked, trying to concentrate on the road.

  “Some Flathead,” he said. “In Arlee. He was supposed to be the toughest Indian in the world.”

  “Was he?”

  “Nah, no way. Wasn’t even close. Wasn’t even tougher than me.”

  He told me how big the Flathead kid was, way over six feet tall and two hundred and some pounds. Big buck Indian. Had hands as big as this and arms as big as that. Had a chin like a damn buffalo. The fighter told me that he hit the Flathead kid harder than he ever hit anybody before.

  “I hit him like he was a white man,” the fighter said. “I hit him like he was two or three white men rolled into one.”