Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “That wood one will break easy,” Max had said. “I want the lum-a-lum one.”

  Of course, he’d meant to say aluminum; we’d both laughed at his mispronunciation. And I’d purchased the lum-a-lum bat.

  So it was a metal bat that I swung one-handed at the black teenager’s head. If it had been cheap and wooden, perhaps the bat would have snapped upon contact and dissipated the force. Perhaps. But this bat did not snap. It was strong and sure, so when it made full contact with the kid’s temple, he dropped to the floor and did not move.

  He was dead. I had killed him.

  I fell to my knees next to the kid, dropped my head onto his chest, and wept.

  I don’t remember much else about the next few hours, but I called 911, opened the door for the police, and led them to the body. And I answered and asked questions.

  “Did he have a gun or knife?”

  “I don’t know. No. Well, I didn’t see one.”

  “He attacked you first?”

  “He ran at me. He was going to run me over.”

  “And that’s when you hit him with the bat?”

  “Yes. It’s my son’s bat. It’s so small. I can’t believe it’s strong enough to—is he really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  His name was Elder Briggs. Elder: such an unusual name for anybody, especially a sixteen-year-old kid. He was a junior at Garfield High School, a B student and backup point guard for the basketball team, an average kid. A good kid, by all accounts. He had no criminal record—had never committed even a minor infraction in school, at home, or in the community—so why had this good kid broken into my house? Why had he decided to steal from me? Why had he made all the bad decisions that had led to his death?

  The investigation was quick but thorough, and I was not charged with any crime. It was self-defense. But then nothing is ever clear, is it? I was legally innocent, that much is true, but was I morally innocent? I wasn’t sure, and neither were a significant percentage of my fellow citizens. Shortly after the police held the press conference that exonerated me, Elder’s family—his mother, father, older brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and priest—organized a protest. It was small, only forty or fifty people, but how truly small can a protest feel when you are the subject—the object—of that protest?

  I watched the live coverage of the event. My wife and son, after briefly returning from Chicago, had only spent a few days with me before they fled back to her parents. We wanted to protect our child from the media. An ironic wish, considering that the media were only interested in me because I’d killed somebody else’s child.

  “The police don’t care about my son because he’s black,” Elder’s mother, Althea, said to a dozen different microphones and as many cameras. “He’s just another black boy killed by a white man. And none of these white men care.”

  As Althea continued to rant about my whiteness, some clever producer—and his editor—cut into footage of me, the white man who owned a baseball bat, walking out of the police station as a free man. It was a powerful piece of editing. It made me look pale and guilty. But all of them—Althea, the other protesters, the reporters, producers, and editors—were unaware of one crucial piece of information: I am not a white man.

  I am an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. Oh, I don’t look Indian, or at least not typically Indian. Some folks assume I’m a little bit Italian or Spanish or perhaps Middle Eastern. Most folks think I’m just another white guy who tans well. And since I’d just spent months in a dark editing room, I was at my palest. But I grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the only son of a mother and father who were also Spokane Indians who grew up on our reservation. Yes, both of my grandfathers had been half-white, but they’d both died before I was born.

  I’m not trying to be holy here. I wasn’t a traditional Indian. I didn’t dance or sing powwow or speak my language or spend my free time marching for Indian sovereignty. And I’d married a white woman. One could easily mock my lack of cultural connection, but one could not question my race. That’s not true, of course. People, especially other Indians, always doubted my race. And I’d always tried to pretend it didn’t matter—I was confident about my identity—but it did hurt my feelings. So when I heard Althea Briggs misidentify my race—and watched the media covertly use editing techniques to confirm her misdiagnosis—I picked up my cell phone and dialed the news station.

  “Hello,” I said to the receptionist. “This is George Wilson. I’m watching your coverage of the protests and I must issue a correction.”

  “Wait, what?” the receptionist asked. “Are you really George Wilson?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “Let me put you straight through to the producer.”

  So the producer took the call and, after asking a few questions to further confirm my identity, he put me on live. So my voice played over images of Althea Briggs weeping and wailing, of her screaming at the sky, at God. How could I have allowed myself to be placed into such a compromising position? How could I have been such an idiot? How could I have been so goddamn callous and self-centered?

  “Hello, Mr. Wilson,” the evening news anchor said. “I understand you have something you’d like to say.”

  “Yes.” My voice carried into tens of thousands of Seattle homes. “I am watching the coverage of the protest, and I insist on a correction. I am not a white man. I am an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians.”

  Yes, that was my first official public statement about the death of Elder Briggs. It didn’t take clever editing to make me look evil; I had accomplished this in one take, live and uncut.

  I was suddenly the most hated man in Seattle. And the most beloved. My fellow liberals spoke of my lateral violence and the destructive influence of colonialism on the indigenous, while conservatives lauded my defensive stand and lonely struggle against urban crime. Local bloggers posted hijacked footage of the most graphically violent films I’d edited.

  And finally, a local news program obtained rough footage of the film I’d been working on when Elder Briggs broke into my house. Though I had, through judicious editing, been trying to protect the young actress, a black actress, the news only played the uncut footage of the obviously frightened and confused woman. And when the reporters ambushed her—her name was Tracy—she, of course, could only respond that, yes, she felt as if she’d been violated. I didn’t blame her for that; I agreed with her. But none of that mattered. I could in no way dispute the story—the cleverly edited series of short films—that had been made about me. Yes, I was a victim, but I didn’t for one second forget that Elder Briggs was dead. I was ashamed and vilified, but I was alive.

  I spent most of that time alone in my basement, in the room where I had killed Elder Briggs. When one spends that much time alone, one ponders. And when one ponders, one creates theories—hypotheses, to explain the world. Oh, hell, forget rationalization; I was pissed, mostly at myself for failing to walk away from a dangerous situation. And I was certainly pissed at the local media, who had become as exploitative as any pornographic moviemaker. But I was also pissed at Althea and Elder Briggs.

  Yes, the kid was a decent athlete; yes, the kid was a decent student; yes, the kid was a decent person. But he had broken into my house. He had smashed my window and was stealing my DVDs and, if I had not been home, would have stolen my computer and television and stereo and every other valuable thing in my house. And his mother, Althea, instead of explaining why her good and decent son had broken and entered a stranger’s house, committing a felony, had instead decided to blame me and accuse me of being yet another white man who was always looking to maim another black kid—had already maimed generations of black kids—when in fact I was a reservation Indian who had been plenty fucked myself by generations of white men. So, Althea, do you want to get into a pain contest? Do you want to participate in the Genocidal Olympics? Wh
ose tragic history has more breadth and depth and length?

  Oh, Althea, why the hell was your son in my house? And oh, my God, it was a Little League baseball bat! It was only twenty inches long and weighed less than three pounds. I could have hit one hundred men in the head—maybe one thousand or one million—and not done anything more than given them a headache. But on that one day, on that one bitter afternoon, I took a swing—a stupid, one-handed, unlucky cut—and killed a kid, a son, a young man who was making a bad decision but who maybe had brains and heart and soul enough to stop making bad decisions.

  Oh, Jesus, I murdered somebody’s potential.

  Oh, Mary, it was self-defense, but it was still murder. I confess: I am a killer.

  How does one survive these revelations? One just lives. Or, rather, one just finally walks out of his basement and realizes that the story is over. It’s old news. There are new villains and heroes, criminals and victims, to be defined and examined and tossed aside.

  Elder Briggs and I were suddenly and equally unimportant.

  My life became quiet again. I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It’s not oil that runs the world, it’s shame. My Max was always going to love me, even when he began to understand my limitations. I didn’t know what my wife thought of my weaknesses.

  Weeks later, in bed, after lovemaking, she interrogated me.

  “Honey,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “With that kid, did you lose your temper?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, you have lost your temper before.”

  “Just one time.”

  “Yes, but you broke your hand when you punched the wall.”

  “Do you think I lost my temper with Elder Briggs?” I asked.

  My wife paused before answering, and in that pause I heard all her doubt and fear. So I got out of bed, dressed, and left the house. I decided to drive to see a hot new independent film—a gory war flick that pretended to be antiwar—but first stepped into a mini-mart to buy candy I could smuggle into the theater.

  I was standing in the candy aisle, trying to decide between a PayDay and a Snickers, when a group of young black men walked into the store. They were drunk or high and they were cursing the world, but in a strangely friendly way. How is it that black men can make a word like motherfucker sound jovial?

  There are people—white folks, mostly—who are extremely uncomfortable in the presence of black people. And I know plenty of Indians—my parents, for example—who are also uncomfortable around black folks. As for me? I suppose I’d always been the kind of nonblack person who celebrated himself for not being uncomfortable around blacks. But now, as I watched those black men jostle one another up and down the aisles, I was afraid—no, I was nervous. What if they recognized me? What if they were friends of Elder Briggs? What if they attacked me?

  Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential. Those young black men paid for their energy drinks and left the store. I paid for my candy bar, walked out to my car, and drove toward the movie theater.

  One block later, I had to hit my brakes when those same black guys jaywalked across the street in front of me. All of them stared me down and walked as slowly as possible through the crosswalk. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years and I’d often had this same encounter with young black men. It was some remnant of the warrior culture, I suppose.

  When it had happened before, I had always made it a point to smile goofily and wave to the black men who were challenging me. Since they thought I was a dorky white guy, I’d behave like one. I’d be what they wanted me to be.

  But this time, when those black men walked in slow motion in front of me, I did not smile or laugh. I just stared back at them. I knew I could hit the gas and slam into them and hurt them, maybe even kill them. I knew I had that power. And I knew that I would not use that power. But what about these black guys? What power did they have? They could only make me wait at an intersection. And so I waited. I waited until they walked around the corner and out of my vision. I waited until another driver pulled up behind me and honked his horn. I was supposed to move, and so I went.

  DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM?

  Sharon and I were college sweethearts at St. Jerome the Second University in Seattle, or, as it is affectionately known, St. Junior’s. We met at the first mixer dance of our freshman year and soon discovered we were the only confirmed Native American Roman Catholics within a three-mile radius of campus, so we slept together that inaugural night, in open defiance of Pope Whomever, and kept sleeping together for the next three years. It was primary love: red girl and red boy on white sheets.

  Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.

  My white mother, Mary, bless her soul, raised me all by herself in Seattle because my Indian daddy, Marvin, died of stomach cancer when I was a baby. I never knew him, but I spent half of every summer on the Spokane Reservation with his mother and father, my grandparents. My mother wanted me to keep in touch with my tribal heritage, but mostly, I read spy novels to my grandfather and shopped garage sales and secondhand stores with my grandmother. I suppose, for many Indians, garage sales and trashy novels are highly traditional and sacred. We all make up our ceremonies as we go along, right? I thought the reservation was ordinary and magical, like a sedate version of Disneyland. All told, I loved to visit but loved my home much more. In Seattle, my mother was a corporate lawyer for old-money companies and sent me to Lakeside Upper School, where I was a schoolmate of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who have become the new-money kings of the world.

  Sharon went to St. Therese’s School for Girls. Her parents, Wilson and Pauline, were both architects; they helped build three of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. If Zeus ate a few million pounds of glass, steel, and concrete, his offal would look something like those buildings. However fecal, those monstrosities won awards and made Wilson and Pauline very popular and wealthy. They lived in a self-designed home on Lake Washington that was lovely and tasteful in all ways except for its ridiculously turquoise exterior. I don’t know whether they painted the house turquoise to honor the sacred stone of the Southwest or if they were being ironic: Ha! We’re Apache Indians from the desert, and this is our big blue house on the water! Deal with it!

  Sharon and I were Native American royalty, the aboriginal prince and princess of western Washington. Sure, we’d been thoroughly defeated by white culture, but dang it, we were conquered and assimilated National Merit Scholars in St. Junior’s English honors department.

  Sharon and I were in love and happy and young and skinny and beautiful and hyperliterate. We recited Shakespeare monologues as foreplay: To be or not to be, take off your panties, oh, Horatio, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, I’m going to wear your panties now. All over campus, we were known as Sharon-and-David-the-Bohemian-Indians. We were inseparable. We ate our meals together and fed each other. Risking expulsion for moral violations, we sneaked into each other’s dorm rooms at night and made love while our respective roommates covered their heads with pillows. Sharon and I always tried to take the same classes and mourned the other’s absence whenever we couldn’t. We read the same books and discussed them while we were naked and intertwined. Oh Lord, we were twins conjoined at the brain, heart, and crotch.

  I proposed to Sharon on the first day of our senior year, and she accepted, and we planned to secretly elope on the day after our graduation.

  In June, the day before graduation, Sharon and I were taking one last walk along the path beside the anonymous creek that ran through the middle of campus. We were
saying good-bye to a good place. Overgrown with fern and blackberry thickets, the creek had been left wild and wet.

  “‘Whose woods these are I think I know,’” I said.

  “Robert Frost wrote the poem,” said Sharon. We were playing Name the Poet, a game of our own invention.

  “‘Know’ and ‘poem,’” I said. “A clumsy rhyme, don’t you think?”

  “You stink,” she said and laughed too loudly. Her joy was always rowdy, rude, and pervasive. I laughed with her and pulled her close to me and pressed my face into her hair and breathed in her scent. After the first time we’d made love, she’d said, Now I know what you smell like, and no matter what else happens to us, I’m always going to know what you smell like.

  “Hey,” I said as we walked the creek. “How about we climb into the bushes and I get you a little wild and wet?”

  We kissed and kissed until she pulled away.

  “Do you hear that?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think it’s a cat. Can you hear it meowing?”

  I listened and heard nothing.

  “You’re imagining things,” I said.

  “No, it’s a cat. I can hear it. It sounds pitiful.”

  “There must be a hundred cats around here. City cats. They’re tough.”

  “No, it sounds hurt. Listen.”

  I listened and finally heard the faint feline cry.

  “It’s down there in the creek somewhere,” she said.

  We peered over the edge and could barely see the water through the thick and thorny overgrowth.

  “I’m sure it’s hunting rats or something,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “No, listen to it. It’s crying. I think it’s stuck.”

  “What do you want me to do? It’s just a dumb-ass cat.”

  “Can you go find it?”

  I looked again at the jungle between that cat and me.

  “I’d need a machete to get through there,” I said.