Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  I try to remain stoic for the photographers as I look toward the future.

  Back home on the reservation, my former classmates graduate: a few can’t read, one or two are just given attendance diplomas, most look forward to the parties. The bright students are shaken frightened, because they don’t know what comes next.

  They smile for the photographer as they look back toward tradition.

  The tribal newspaper runs my photograph and the photograph of my former classmates side by side.

  Postscript: Class Reunion

  Victor said, “Why should we organize a reservation high school reunion? My graduating class has a reunion every weekend at the Powwow Tavern.”

  GENTRIFICATION

  A month ago, my next-door neighbors tossed a horribly stained mattress onto the curb in front of their house. I suppose they believed the mattress would be collected on our next regular garbage day. But the city charges thirty dollars to dispose of bulky items and you have to go online and schedule the pickup. Obviously, my neighbors had not bothered to schedule such an appointment. I’d thought the city, once they’d learned of the abandoned mattress, would have collected it anyway and automatically added the charge, plus a fine, to my neighbors’ utility bill.

  But four garbage collection days passed and nothing happened. The mattress, dank and dirty to begin with, had begun to mold. There were new holes in the fabric that I assumed were made by rats. We live in a large waterfront city so there are millions of rodents. It’s an expected, if rather unwelcome, part of urban life. In every city in the world, there are more rats than people. But one doesn’t throw a potential home for them onto the curb in front of one’s house. That mattress was an apartment building for rats. Or at least a vacation home.

  I’d thought to call the city and tell them about the mattress, but I doubted that I would have remained anonymous.

  I am the only white man living on a block where all of my neighbors are black. Don’t get me wrong. My neighbors are like any other group of neighbors I’ve ever had. They are the same self-appointed guardians, social directors, friendly alcoholics, paranoid assholes, overburdened parents, sullen teenagers, flirty housewives, elderly misers, amateur comedians, and hermits that exist in every neighborhood of every city in the country. They are people, not black people; and I am a person, not a white person. And that is how we relate to one another, as people. I’m not treated as the white guy on the block, at least not overtly or rudely, and I do not treat my neighbors as if they are some kind of aliens. We live as people live, aware of racial dynamics but uninterested in their applications as it applies to our neighborhood.

  My next-door neighbors, an older couple with two adult sons living at home, are kind. All four of them often sit on their front porch, sharing snacks and drinks, and greeting everybody who walks past. But they’d been sitting only a few feet away from the mattress they’d so haphazardly tossed onto the curb. How could they have continued to live as if creating such a mess were normal? I wanted to ask them what they planned to do about the mattress, though I wasn’t even sure of the older son’s name. It’s something ornately African-sounding that I hadn’t quite understood when I’d first met him, and it was too late, a year later, to ask for the proper pronunciation. And that made me feel racist. If his name were something more typical, like Ron or Eddie or Vlad or Pete or Carlos or Juan, then I would have remembered it later. The simple names are easier to remember. So, in this regard, perhaps I am racist.

  And, frankly, it felt racist for me to look out my front window at that abandoned mattress and wonder about the cultural norms that allowed my neighbors, so considerate otherwise, to create a health hazard. And why hadn’t my other neighbors complained? Or maybe they had complained and the city had ignored the mattress because it was a black neighborhood? Who was the most racist in that situation? Was it the white man who was too terrified to confront his black neighbors on their rudeness? Was it the black folks who abandoned the mattress on their curb? Was it the black people who didn’t feel the need to judge the behavior of their black neighbors? Was it the city, which let a mattress molder on the street in full view of hundreds, if not thousands, of people? Or was it all of us, black and white, passively revealing that, despite our surface friendliness, we didn’t really care about one another?

  In any case, after another garbage day had passed, I rented a U-Haul truck, a flatbed with enough room to carry the mattress, and parked it—hid it, really—two blocks away. I didn’t want to embarrass or anger my neighbors so I set my alarm for three A.M. I didn’t turn on the lights as I donned gloves, coveralls, and soft-soled shoes. Perhaps I was being overcautious. But it was fun, too, to be on a secret mission.

  I slowly opened my front door, worried the hinges might creak, and took step after careful step on the porch, avoiding the loose boards. Then I walked across my lawn rather than on the sidewalk. A dog barked. It was slightly foggy. A bat swooped near a streetlight. For a moment, I felt like I’d walked into a werewolf movie. Then I wondered what the police would do if they discovered a clean-cut white man creeping through a black neighborhood.

  “Buddy,” the cops would say. “You don’t fit the profile of the neighborhood.”

  I almost laughed out loud at my joke. That would have been a stupid way to get caught.

  Then I stood next to the mattress and realized that I hadn’t figured out how I was supposed to carry that heavy, awkward, waterlogged thing two blocks to the truck.

  Given more time, I probably could have rigged up a pulley system or a Rube Goldberg contraption that would have worked. But all I had that night was brute strength, without the brute.

  I kicked the mattress a few times to flush out any rats. Then I grabbed the mattress’s plastic handles—thank God they were still intact—and tried to lift the thing. It was heavier than I expected, and smelled and felt like a dead dolphin.

  At first I tried to drag the mattress, but that made too much noise. Then I tried to carry it on my back, but it kept sliding from my grip. My only option was to carry the mattress on my head, like an African woman gracefully walking with a vase of water balanced on her head, except without her grace.

  Of course, the mattress was too heavy and unbalanced to be carried that way for long. It kept slipping off my head onto the sidewalk. It didn’t make much noise when it fell; I was more worried that my lung-burning panting would wake everybody.

  It took me twenty minutes to carry that mattress to the truck and another ten to slide it into the flatbed. Then I got behind the wheel and drove to the city’s waste disposal facility in the Fremont neighborhood. But it wouldn’t open for another two hours so I parked on the street, lay across the seat, and fell asleep in the truck.

  I was awakened by the raw noise of recycling and garbage trucks. I wiped my mouth, ran my fingers through my hair, and hoped that I wouldn’t offend anybody with my breath. I also hoped that the facility workers wouldn’t think that filthy mattress was mine. But I shouldn’t have worried. The workers were too busy to notice one bad-breathed man with one rat-stained mattress.

  They charged me forty bucks to dispose of the mattress, and it was worth it. Then I returned the truck to the U-Haul rental site and took a taxi back to my house.

  I felt clean. I felt rich and modest, like an anonymous benefactor.

  When I stepped out of the taxi I saw my neighbors—mother, father, and two adult sons—sitting in the usual places on their porch. They were drinking Folgers instant coffee, awful stuff they’d shared with me on many occasions.

  I waved to them but they didn’t wave back. I pretended they hadn’t noticed me and waved again. They stared at me. They knew what I had done.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” said the son with the African name. “We can take care of ourselves.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You think you’re better than us, don’t you?”

  I wanted to say that, when it came to abandoned mattresses, I was better.
<
br />   “Right now, I feel worse,” I said.

  I knew I had done a good thing, so why did I hurt so bad? Why did I feel judged?

  “You go home, white boy,” the son said. “And don’t you bother us anymore.”

  I knew the entire block would now shun me. I felt pale and lost, like an American explorer in the wilderness.

  FAME

  You’ve seen the viral video of the zoo lion, in its enclosure, trying to eat a toddler girl through the observation glass, right?

  I was there, at the zoo, and watched it live.

  Three million people think it’s the cutest thing ever. And the toddler’s mother, as she filmed the scene, laughed and laughed.

  I didn’t think it was funny. I kept thinking, Shit, that lion wants to eat that kid’s face. But, yeah, yeah, laugh at the lion. Laugh at the apex predator trapped behind glass.

  I was only at the zoo because I was trying to impress a woman who made balloon animals. She worked part-time near the primate enclosure, but I met her when she worked my niece’s birthday party at the local community center.

  Her giraffes were great; her elephants were passable; her tarantulas looked like tarantulas so nobody wanted them.

  She made fifty bucks for each party she worked. The zoo paid her minimum wage plus commission. But who comes to the zoo for balloon animals? If you’re going to buy something for a kid at the zoo, then you’re going to get a stuffed animal.

  So she was a beautiful woman with an eccentric skill that was financially unsustainable.

  I liked her well enough to think about being in love with her. We’d been on two dates.

  Later that afternoon, over coffee, halfway through our third date, she told me I had a great face but weighed thirty pounds too much.

  Get skinny, she said, like we could wear each other’s jeans, and then maybe I’ll have sex with you.

  I knew I’d never be thin enough. So we dumped our coffees and I walked her home. We didn’t talk. What needed to be said? I probably should have let her walk home alone, but I faintly hoped she’d change her mind about me.

  It was a security building, and she didn’t revise her opinion of me, so I said goodbye on the sidewalk.

  She apologized for rejecting me.

  I said, Apologies offered and accepted are what make us human.

  She laughed and walked into her building. Through the lobby window, I watched her step into her elevator and disappear behind the closing doors.

  I knew she was rising away from me.

  I wasn’t angry. I was lonely. I was bored. And I half-remembered a time when I’d been feared.

  Nostalgic, I pressed my mouth against the glass and chewed.

  If somebody had filmed me and posted it online then I would have become that guy with the teeth. I would have become a star.

  FAITH

  A few months ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went to a dinner party at Aaron’s house. He’s a longtime friend of Sarah’s. They were counselors at a summer Bible camp in the ’70s. I suspected they fell in love, but I doubt they’d consummated that teenage infatuation. Or maybe they did it in a boathouse and felt elated and guilty. I never asked them. Who wants to know such a thing? Both of them had grown up in strict Evangelical families. Aaron was still a Jesus freak, but Sarah had become an American Catholic. Like me, she was disinterested in the Pope and in love with Eucharist, that glorious metaphoric cannibalism of our Messiah. We had baptized our daughter, Jessica, but she hadn’t been confirmed. And we only went to Mass on Easter and Christmas and maybe three other random Sundays during the year.

  Aaron’s dinner party was less about pot roast and more about group prayer. He’d called for a gathering of his old and new Evangelical friends. And he’d invited Sarah despite her conversion to my religion. I’ve always hated any party, but was especially wary of one that included conservative Christians. My wife had an Evangelical streak that surfaced when she was around Jesus freaks, and I thought it was ugly and unsexy.

  “If they start faith-healing,” I said to Sarah, “I am out of there.”

  “It’s just dinner,” she said.

  Five minutes after we arrived at the party, and one minute into a conversation with a couple we’d just met, a fifty-something blonde said, “I have an artificial leg.” Just like that. Boom. After somebody says that, you have to work hard to not look down and try to figure out which leg was which. And if I’d been in any other environment except for that bunch of repressed Christians, I would have said, “Cool. Which one?” And probably asked to touch it. But all I could do was sort of stammer. She was wearing a knee-length black skirt, black stockings, and long black boots, so it was impossible to tell which leg was which. I suspected she’d often tried to shock people with sudden announcements about her prosthetic limb. Perhaps she was self-conscious about it. Or maybe she was just funny. Maybe she used humor, consciously or subconsciously, to gain power over the situation. Fair enough.

  Carefully balancing my plate, I sat next to her on the couch during the dinner party and kept taking quick glances at her legs. I could not contain my curiosity. She had great legs, by the way, both very shapely, so I thought, Damn, that is an awesome artificial leg. And then I wondered if it was okay to call it an artificial leg. She used it in all the ways that a person uses a leg, right? And she was so natural, so practiced, that her two legs seemed to work in exactly the same ways. So wasn’t the prosthetic leg, philosophically speaking, as real as the other one?

  Anyway, she eventually caught me staring, and while it’s not unusual for a woman to catch a man staring at some part of her, this particular moment wasn’t about passion. She was a very attractive woman, but I wasn’t looking at her legs out of sexual interest. I mean, while I noticed the shapeliness of her legs and of her in general, I was only interested in solving the mystery of which leg was made of plastic and metal. But my glances had become longer and more obvious, so she defensively crossed her legs, and then I felt sure the right one was flesh-bone-and-blood because it moved in ways that I assumed you can’t move a prosthetic. I looked up at her eyes. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t exactly blurt out at a dinner party, “Hey, I’m really sorry for objectifying you there, and I do respect you as a human being, even if you are a crazy fundamentalist Christian, and if you want to stare at my legs or any other part of me, that’s okay, because men love to be objectified.” But instead of being, you know, insane, I decided it was best to have a normal conversation with her.

  “So what do you do?” I asked.

  “I’m a guidance counselor at an elementary school in Rainier Valley,” she said. Rainier Valley was the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in Seattle—actually, the only ethnically diverse neighborhood—and therefore had the most poor people and/or first-generation immigrants.

  “That must be pretty tough,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Education isn’t always the first priority. And there is a lot of poverty, as you know. And drug use and domestic violence. And sometimes kids come to school hungry.”

  “Wow, that must be heartbreaking,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But it’s good work. Sometimes, you can save a kid’s life. Or at least give them a chance to save their own lives. I’ve had about a dozen kids who’ve gone on to graduate from college. One of them is a teacher at my school, so that’s pretty amazing. Every time I see him, I’m reminded of why I do this work.”

  Okay, so she had a bit of a Messiah complex, but what Christian doesn’t? And, hey, I thought, she’s one of those crazy religious people who actually lives up to her ideals, so I liked her all of a sudden. I liked her too suddenly and too much.

  “So what do you do?” she asked me.

  “I’m a firefighter,” I said.

  “You ever pull anybody out of a burning house?” she asked.

  “A few times,” I said.

  “Oh, so we have the same jobs,” she said, and leaned a bit closer to me. I could smell her perfume and it remin
ded me of every woman I had ever slept with.

  And then she told a series of very funny and entertaining stories about her husband, who was sitting on another couch five feet away from us. She was performing for everybody at the party. Most of the stories were gently mocking—like most of the stories that spouses tell about each other—but there was also a current of cruelty. The basic theme of each story was, “My husband is the omega wolf in any pack.” And her short, bald, chubby husband quietly sat there and accepted the abuse.

  “Do you know that SkyMall catalogue?” she asked all of us.

  Of course we did. Anybody who has ever traveled by airplane has glanced through that catalogue of garden gnomes, quick-drying polyester pantsuits, and cell phone chargers that work in countries no one’s ever heard of.

  “Have you ever seen that bug vacuum?” she asked.

  None of the others remembered it, but I did.

  “You mean that red thing with the long tube?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and explained it to the others. “You put the nozzle over the bugs, hit the go button, and it sucks them up. And it has these extender tubes that are, like, thirty feet long. You can reach the top of a church to vacuum up bugs. And you can supposedly dump them outside, still alive.”

  We all laughed.

  “My husband bought one of those things,” she said. “Right from the airplane. He went on the in-flight Wi-Fi and ordered it at thirty thousand feet.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone buying anything from SkyMall.” I said. “It’s so goofy.”

  And then I realized that I’d called her husband goofy. I wanted to pretend that I did it by accident, but no, I was competing for his wife’s attention. They’d been married for decades and I was flirting with her in front of his friends. And I was also doing it in front of my wife, whom I hadn’t even thought of since I’d sat down beside that woman. I glanced over at her husband and he was staring down at his open hands. I wondered if he wanted to make fists.