Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “Just don’t divorce me because of ball,” Joey said.

  “Just don’t wake up the boys,” Sharon said.

  She rolled over and went back to sleep. Joey got dressed, warmed up his car, and drove toward Big Ed’s apartment building. Divorced for two years, Ed lived in a studio apartment with his plasma television. It was a much better relationship than the one he’d had with his wife.

  “I don’t miss her,” Ed had said more than once. “But I miss seeing my son every day. And I miss seeing us all together, you know?”

  Joey knew.

  On his way to Ed’s place, Joey noticed a lone figure shooting hoops on the St. Jerome basketball court. It was too dark and far for Joey to be sure, but the night-shift hoopster was approximately the same size and shape as Big Ed.

  Joey pulled over, turned off the car, and watched the maybe-Ed shoot and miss jump shot after jump shot. Joey kept score.

  Miss. Off the front rim.

  Miss. Off the side of the backboard.

  Miss. Front rim.

  Miss. Off the top of the backboard.

  Miss. Front rim.

  Air ball.

  Joey watched the man, unguarded and alone on the court, miss twenty-one jump shots in a row. In the dark, in such a large but quiet city, it was an eerie display of ineptitude.

  Then maybe-Ed dribbled left and right and took a running jump shot and scudded it off the bottom of the rim. Maybe-Ed angrily grabbed the rebound and threw the ball as hard and far as he could. It flew maybe fifty feet through the air, bounced through a parking lot, rolled across the manicured grass, and came to a rest at the base of a pine tree.

  “Nice shot,” Joey said to himself.

  Maybe-Ed walked to center court, perhaps in initial pursuit of the ball, but he stopped and stood still for an impossibly long time. Joey wondered how a person could stand so motionless for—yes, Joey kept checking his watch—twenty-three damn minutes. Joey wondered if this maybe-Ed needed help but, Jesus, what could he do to help anyway? Maybe this guy was some schizophrenic transient who was stuck in some dreamworld. Maybe this homeless hoopster was dangerous.

  Two or three times, Joey told himself to start the car and drive away. What kind of sad bastard, homeless or not, plays basketball in the middle of the night? But worse, what kind of hoopster turns himself into a goddamn statue in the middle of that night?

  And then, finally, this maybe-Ed—Screw that, Joey decided, it had to be Ed; yes, it was Ed—walked off the court, away from the basketball, and disappeared into the dark.

  “Jesus,” Joey said aloud, and made the Sign of the Cross. He wasn’t Catholic—he wasn’t a Christian at all—but he knew he’d watched something unbeatific happen on a Catholic basketball court.

  “Jesus,” Joey said again, just to be sure.

  Soon after that, Joey started his car and drove back home. Inside the house, he took off his clothes—he was naked for the fourth time that day—and crawled back into bed with his wife.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “With Ed?” she asked. “How is he?”

  “Okay, I guess,” Joey said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  She kissed him and quickly fell back to sleep. Awake for hours more, Joey promised himself that he would never ask Big Ed about his late-night hoops practice. Every man must have his secrets, right? And every man was supposed to ignore every other man’s secrets. That’s how the game was supposed to be played.

  IDOLATRY

  Marie waited for hours. That was okay. She was Indian and everything Indian—powwows, funerals, and weddings—required patience. This audition wasn’t Indian, but she was ready when they called her name.

  “What are you going to sing?” the British man asked.

  “Patsy Cline,” she said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  She’d only sung the first verse before he stopped her.

  “You are a terrible singer,” he said. “Never sing again.”

  She knew this moment would be broadcast on national television. She’d already agreed to accept any humiliation.

  “But my friends, my voice coaches, my mother, they all say I’m great.”

  “They lied.”

  How many songs had Marie sung in her life? How many lies had she been told? On camera, Marie did the cruel math, rushed into the green room, and wept in her mother’s arms.

  In this world, we must love the liars or go unloved.

  PROTEST

  My friend Jimmy was a pale Indian, though all of his brothers and sisters were dark. You might have wondered if Jimmy’s real father was a white guy. Some tribal members did wonder, but Jimmy had the same widow’s peak cowlick as his browner siblings. When he was little and living on the rez, Jimmy got teased a bunch. Other Indians called him Salt or Vanilla or Snow White, so yeah, he was insecure about his pigment. But he never would have admitted to that insecurity. Instead, he pretended to embrace it. He insisted on being called White Eagle Feather, or Eagle for short, like that was his real Indian name. But you don’t get to give yourself an Indian name, so most people ignored his wishes and still called him Jimmy. I was his best friend so I called him Eagle once in a while, but I usually called him Ego.

  Yeah, Jimmy caught a lot of shit, even from me. But I was also the one who convinced him to go to Spokane Community College.

  We shared a studio apartment in Hillyard, a poor neighborhood near the college, and went to class more often than not. Jimmy and I were studying auto repair and planned on opening a garage after we graduated. It was a small dream, I guess, but Jimmy acted like it was a supertraditional Indian thing.

  “A car won’t be a car after we work on it,” he said. “It won’t have horsepower. It will be a powerful horse.”

  It was a goofy thing to say, but Jimmy took it seriously. Almost overnight, Jimmy got political. It happens all the time in the Indian world, especially among the pale warriors. I think their radicalism becomes inversely proportional to their skin color. But Jimmy’s transformation was sadder than most. He became a community college rebel and started showing up to auto repair class shirtless and barefoot.

  “Shoes were invented by the white man,” he said.

  “Come on, Ego,” I said. “I like shoes. Everybody likes shoes.”

  But he stopped listening to my advice. He got all weird and fundamental. He became so Indian that he jaywalked constantly. He refused to obey traffic signals and would not defer to moving vehicles.

  “My tribal sovereignty isn’t only about the land,” he said. “As an Indian man, it’s also about the sovereignty of my body. And the space around my body. Because I am indigenous, I always get the right of way.”

  He also started challenging any white man in a uniform—security guards, cops, and firemen. He gave shit to postal workers.

  “Fuck them,” he said. “And their Nazi fucking shorts.”

  While running along the Spokane River, he spotted a sheriff’s cruiser in a parking lot and flipped off the two cops inside. The cops recognized the shirtless, barefoot guy slogging along the jogging path.

  One cop leaned out and shouted, “Run, Forrest, run.”

  The other cop yelled, “Go, Dog, go.”

  Jimmy wanted to be taken seriously—he wanted to be feared—so he ran up to the cop car and kicked the driver’s door. Then kicked it again.

  The cops scrambled out of their seats, chased and tackled Jimmy.

  “You racist bastards,” Jimmy yelled at the confused cops. They couldn’t figure out why a white man was calling two white cops racists. Yeah, Jimmy was feeling oppressed but the cops didn’t even realize he was Indian. They thought he was just another white-trash Hillyard redneck.

  A few hours later, Jimmy called me from jail.

  “I resisted,” he said. “I’ve started a resistance movement.”

  “Come on, Ego,” I said. “And I am not bailing you
out.”

  “Don’t want bail,” he said. “I’m a political prisoner.”

  “You’re an asshole is what you are.”

  Then, a day after that, the television told me that a cop had shot and killed a homeless Indian named Harold in downtown Spokane.

  “He had a knife,” the cop said.

  A carving knife, we learned, about three inches long. The murdered Indian, Harold, trying to reconnect with his culture, had been taking carving lessons at the Indian Center. He came from a tribe that made totem poles. They made canoes. Most of the tribe drank; some drank themselves to death.

  “He had a threatening look on his face,” the cop said.

  I knew Harold a little bit. Every Indian pretty much knows every other Indian. Harold wasn’t an angry man. That was his face.

  I phoned Jimmy to talk about the shooting. But I got his voice mail.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Indians are still prey animals, enit? When are they going to stop shooting at us?”

  I was so mad at the world that I had to make a joke. I wanted to make Jimmy laugh.

  “You see, Ego,” I said, “looking as white as you can be is a good thing. Ain’t no cop going to shoot you because he thinks you’re an angry redskin.”

  Later, I realized it had been a terrible thing to say, so I called him back and apologized to his machine. A few days after that, I called and apologized to his machine again. After a few months of silence, I called him but his phone was disconnected. I asked around town about him, but nobody knew where he was. I never heard from him or of him again.

  Jimmy’s last act was to disappear, and that was probably the most Indian thing he had ever done.

  WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO FRANK SNAKE CHURCH?

  Frank’s heart fibrillated as he walked along a tree-line trail on the northern slope of Mount Rainier. He staggered, leaned against a small pine tree for balance, but tumbled over it instead, rolled for twenty or thirty yards down the slope, and fell over a small cliff onto the scree below. A moment later, Frank’s arrhythmic heart corrected itself and resumed beating normally, but he wondered if he was going to die on the mountain. He was only thirty-nine years old and weighed only eleven more pounds than he had when he graduated from high school, but he’d been smoking too many unfiltered Camels, and his cholesterol level was a dangerous 344, exactly the same as Ted Williams’s career batting average. But damn it, Frank thought, he was a Spokane Indian, and Indians are supposed to die young. Thirty-nine years is old for a Spokane. Old enough to join the American Association of Retired Indians. Frank laughed. Bloody and hurt on this mountain, his heart maybe scarred and twisted beyond repair, and he was still making jokes. How indigenous, Frank thought, how wonderfully aboriginal, applause, applause, applause, applause for me and my people. Still laughing, Frank pushed himself to his hands and knees and sat on a flat rock. His heart beat slow and steady. He breathed easily. He felt no tingling pain in his chest, arms, or legs. He wasn’t lightheaded or nauseated. He seemed to be fine. Maybe his heart was okay; maybe it had missed only one dance step in a lifetime of otherwise lovely coronary waltzes. He was cut and scraped, a nasty gash on his arm would probably need stitches, but none of his wounds seemed to be too serious. He didn’t have any broken bones or sprains. So there was the diagnosis: His heart had played a practical joke on him—how terribly amusing, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha—and he was bruised and battered and had one hell of a headache, but he’d live.

  Carefully, painfully, Frank crawled back up the slope to the trail. Once there, while still on his hands and knees, he took a few deep breaths and promised himself that he’d visit a superhero cardiologist as soon as he got off the mountain. He’d promise to see an organic nutritionist, aromatherapist, deep-tissue masseuse, feng shui consultant, yoga master, and Mormon stand-up comedian if those promises would help him get off this mountain. Frank stood, tested his balance, and found it to be true enough, so he resumed his rough trek along the trail. He felt stronger with each step. He was now convinced he was going to be okay. Yes, he was going to be fine. But after a few more steps, an electrical charge jolted him. Damn, Frank thought, I have a heart attack, fall down a damn mountain, and then I crawl back only to get struck by lightning. Frank imagined the newspaper headline: HEART-DISEASED FOREST RANGER STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. Frank was imagining the idiot readers laughing at the idiot park ranger when another electrical bolt knocked him back ten feet and dropped him to the ground, where a third lightning strike shocked him again. Damn, Frank thought, this lightning has a personal vendetta against me. He felt a fourth electrical charge shoot up his spine and into his brain. He convulsed and vomited. He kicked and punched at the air, and then he couldn’t move at all. As he lay paralyzed on the trail, Frank thought: This is it, now I’m really dead, and I have crapped my pants; I’m going to die with half-digested pieces of mushroom and sausage pizza stuck to my ass; humiliation, degradation, sin, and mortal shame. But Frank didn’t die. Instead, as the electricity fired inside his brain, Frank saw an image of his father, Harrison Snake Church, as the old man lay faceup on the floor of his kitchen in Seattle. Harrison’s eyes were open, but there was no light behind them; blood dripped from his nose and ears. In great pain, Frank understood that he hadn’t suffered a heart attack or been struck by lightning. No, he’d been gifted and cursed with the first real vision of his life, and though Frank was one of the very few Indian agnostics in the world, he accepted this vision as a simple and secular truth: His father was dead.

  How much can one son love one father? Frank loved his father enough to stand and stagger five miles to the logging road where he’d parked his truck. He knew he should get on the radio and call for help. He was exhausted and in no safe shape to drive. But he also knew that his father was lying dead on the kitchen floor. Covered with blood and food, half naked in a ratty bathrobe that his father called a valuable antique, Jerry Springer or Dr. Phil lecturing on the television. Frank needed to be the first on the scene. He needed to restore his father’s dignity before the proper authorities were called. Perhaps his father’s spirit was waiting for him. But Frank didn’t believe in spirits, in souls, in the afterlife. Why was he thinking about his father’s soul? Mr. Death, Frank thought, you have entered my house and rearranged the furniture. But it didn’t matter what Frank believed. With or without soul and spirit, Harrison was lying dead on the kitchen floor and should be lifted, cleaned, and covered with old quilts. Frank needed to perform burial ceremonies. Harrison needed to have his honor restored, and Frank was the only one who could, or should, do the restoration.

  So Frank drove his truck dangerously fast along fifteen miles of logging and undeveloped roads. He didn’t need a map; he’d been a forest ranger at Mount Rainier for ten years and had driven thousands of miles on these roads. As he drove, Frank thought of his father and wondered how the old man should be remembered. As he traveled toward his father’s dead body, Frank composed the eulogy: “Thank you all for coming here today to say good-bye to my father. For those of you who know me, you know I’m not a man of words. But I do have a few things I’d like to say about my father. Harrison was a beloved man. Beloved. I guess you’re supposed to use words like that at a funeral. Fancy words. But I guess I should just say it simple. Most people liked my dad, and quite a few loved him. He was an active member of St. Therese Church. He was always a good Catholic, maybe the only Indian of his generation who went to Catholic boarding school on purpose. That was a joke. I don’t know if it was funny or not. But I’m an Indian, and Indians are supposed to be funny at funerals. At least that’s what it says in the Indian Funeral Handbook. That was another joke.

  “Here at St. Therese, my dad volunteered for the youth programs, and he was one of the most dependable readers and Eucharistic ministers. He read the gospels with more passion and pride than the Jesuits. Ay, jokes. Sorry about that, Father Terry, but you know it’s true. Ay, jokes.

  “My dad, Harry, he was fond of telling people how he would’ve become a priest i
f he hadn’t loved the ladies so much. And there were always a few ladies who would have loved him back, and you know who you are. You’re the ones crying the most. Ay, jokes. But of course my loyal dad has been chaste since his wife, my mother, Helen, died of brain cancer twenty-one years ago. So maybe my dad was like a Jesuit, except he didn’t have sex, unlike most of the Jesuits. Ay, jokes.

  “My mom died only three days after I graduated from high school. It was a terrible, ugly death. And my dad was never really happy again and never looked to be loved again by another woman, but he stayed active like a shark: Don’t stop moving or you die. Ha, he was the Great Red Whale, my dad. Ay, jokes. Maybe my dad and I were the Great Red Whale together. We were always together. I’ve lived in the same house with him all of my life. I guess, in some real way, my father became my mother. Harrison was Helen. He adopted some of her mannerisms, you know, like he scratches his head whenever he’s frustrated, just like she does.

  “Listen to me. I keep talking about them in the present tense. And then I talk about them in the past tense. And I was never any good at English grammar anyway. So you can blame my high school English teacher for that. Sorry about that, Ms. Balum. Ay, jokes.

  “After he got old, my dad was the crossing guard at Thirty-fourth and Union and knew the names of all of his kids. Since they were all Catholic kids, they only had twelve names. Or maybe eleven, since nobody has named their kid Judas since Judas was named Judas by his folks. Ay, jokes.

  “My old man was strong for an old man, you know, and he could still hit ten or twelve of those long-range set shots in a row. Basketball was always my dad’s passion. He was Idaho State High School Basketball Player of the Year in 1952. He loved the Lakers when they played in Minneapolis, and he loved them more after they moved to Los Angeles. Elgin Baylor. Gail Goodrich. Jerry West. Wilt Chamberlain. Happy Hairston. Those guys won thirty-three in a row in 1973.