Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “How much did you tell her it would cost?”

  “Twenty.”

  “So you gave her an eighty-percent discount?”

  “I guess.”

  He stared at me. Judged me. He’d once been a Pulitzer finalist for a story about a rural drug syndicate.

  “And there’s more,” I said.

  “Yes?” His anger was shrinking his vocabulary.

  “I told her we’d run it tomorrow.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Damn it, kid.”

  I think he wanted to fire me, to throw me out of his office, out of his building, out of his city and country. I suddenly realized that he was grieving for Lois, that he was angry about her death. Of course he was. They had worked together for two decades. They were friends. So I tried to forgive him for his short temper. And I did forgive him, a little.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well, shit on a rooster,” he said, and leaned back in his chair. “Listen. I know this is a tough gig here. This is not your job. I know that. But this is a newspaper and we measure the world by column inches, okay? We have to make tough decisions about what can fit and what cannot fit. And by telling this woman—this poor woman—that she could have this space tomorrow, you have fucked with the shape of my world, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He ran his fingers through his hair (my father did the same thing when he was pissed), made a quick decision, picked up his phone, and made the call.

  “Hey, Charlie, it’s me,” he said. “Do we have any room for another obituary? With a photo?”

  I could hear the man screaming on the other end.

  “I know, I know,” the chief said. “But this is an important one. It’s a family thing.”

  The chief listened to more screaming, then hung up on the other guy.

  “All right,” he said. “The woman gets one column inch for the obit.”

  “That’s not much,” I said.

  “She’s going to have to write a haiku, isn’t she?”

  I wanted to tell him that haikus were not supposed to be elegies, but then I realized that I wasn’t too sure about that literary hypothesis.

  “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “We need the obit and the photo by three o’clock.”

  It was almost one.

  “How do I get them?” I asked.

  “Well, you could do something crazy like get in a car, drive to this woman’s house, pick up the obit and the photo, and bring them back here.”

  “I don’t have a car,” I said.

  “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you go sign a vehicle out of the car pool and do your fucking job?”

  I fled. Obtained the car. And while cursing Lois and her early death, and then apologizing to Lois for cursing her, I drove up Maple to the widow’s small house on Francis. A green house with a white fence that was maybe one foot tall. A useless fence. It couldn’t keep out anything.

  I rang the doorbell and waited a long time for the woman—Mona, her name was Mona—to answer. She was scrawny, thin-haired, dark for a white woman. At least eighty years old. Maybe ninety. Maybe older than that. I did the math. Geronimo was still alive when this woman was born. An old raven, I thought. No, too small to be a raven. She was a starling.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi, Mona,” I said. “I’m from the Spokesman; we talked on the phone.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes, please come in.”

  I followed her inside into the living room. She slowly, painfully, sat on a wooden chair. She was too weak and frail to lower herself into a soft chair, I guess. I sat on her couch. I looked around the room and realized that every piece of furniture, every painting, every knickknack and candlestick, was older than me. Most of the stuff was probably older than my parents. I saw photographs of Mona, a man I assumed was her husband, and five or six children, and a few dozen grandchildren. Her children and grandchildren, I guess. Damn, her children were older than my parents. Her grandchildren were older than me.

  “You have a nice house,” I said.

  “My husband and I lived here for sixty years. We raised five children here.”

  “Where are your children now?”

  “Oh, they live all over the country. But they’re all flying in tonight and tomorrow for the funeral. They loved their father. Do you love your father?”

  My father was a drunken liar.

  “Yes,” I said. “I love him very much.”

  “That’s good, you’re a good son. A very good son.”

  She smiled at me. I realized she’d forgotten why I was there.

  “Ma’am, about the obituary and the photograph?”

  “Yes?” she said, still confused.

  “We need them, the obituary you wrote for your husband, and his photograph?”

  And then she remembered.

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes, I have them right here in my pocket.”

  She handed me the photograph and the obit. And yes, it was clumsily written and mercifully short. The man in the photograph was quite handsome. A soldier in uniform. Black hair, blue eyes. I wondered if his portrait had been taken before or after he’d killed somebody.

  “My husband was a looker, wasn’t he?” she asked.

  “Yes, very much so.”

  “I couldn’t decide which photograph to give you. I mean, I thought I might give you a more recent one. To show you what he looks like now. He’s still very handsome. But then I thought, No, let’s find the most beautiful picture of them all. Let the world see my husband at his best. Don’t you think that’s romantic?”

  “Yes, you must have loved him very much,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, he was ninety percent perfect. Nobody’s all perfect, of course. But he was close, he was very close.”

  Her sentiment was brutal.

  “Listen, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I have to get this photograph back to the newspaper if they’re going to run on time.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, young man, there’s no rush.”

  Now I was confused. “But I thought the funeral was tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, silly, I buried my husband six months ago. In Veterans’ Cemetery. He was at D-Day.”

  “And your children?”

  “Oh, they were here for the funeral, but they went away.”

  But she looked around the room as if she could still see her kids. Or maybe she was remembering them as they had been, the children who’d indiscriminately filled the house and then, just as indiscriminately, had moved away and into their own houses. Or maybe everything was ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. She scared me. Maybe this house was lousy with ghosts. I was afraid that Lois’s ghost was going to touch me on the shoulder and gently correct my errors.

  “Mona, are you alone here?” I asked. I didn’t want to know the answer.

  “No, no—well, yes, I suppose. But my Henry, he’s buried in the backyard.”

  “Henry?”

  “My cat. Oh, my beloved cat.”

  And then she told me about Henry and his death. The poor cat, just as widowed as Mona, had fallen into a depression after her husband’s death. Cat and wife mourned together.

  “You know,” she said. “I read once that grief can cause cancer. I think it’s true. At least, it’s true for cats. Because that’s what my Henry had, cancer of the blood. Cats get it all the time. They see a lot of death, they do.”

  And so she, dependent on the veterinarian’s kindness and charity, had arranged for her Henry to be put down.

  “What’s that big word for killing cats?” she asked me.

  “Euthanasia,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s the word. It’s kind of a pretty word, isn’t it? It sounds pretty, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Such a pretty word for such a sad and lonely thing,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  “You
can name your daughter Euthanasia and nobody would even notice if they didn’t know what the word meant.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “My cat was too sick to live,” Mona said.

  And then she told me how she’d held Henry as the vet injected him with the death shot. And, oh, how she cried when Henry’s heart and breath slowed and stopped. He was gone, gone, gone. And so she brought him home, carried him into the backyard, and laid him beside the hole she’d paid a neighbor boy to dig. That neighbor boy was probably fifty years old.

  “I prayed for a long time,” she said. “I wanted God to know that my cat deserved to be in Heaven. And I didn’t want Henry to be in cat heaven. Not at all. I wanted Henry to go find my husband. I want them both to be waiting for me.”

  And so she prayed for hours. Who can tell the exact time at such moments? And then she kneeled beside her cat. And that was painful because her knees were so old, so used—like the ancient sedan in the garage—and she pushed her Henry into the grave and poured salt over him.

  “I read once,” she said, “that the Egyptians used to cover dead bodies with salt. It helps people get to Heaven quicker. That’s what I read.”

  When she poured the salt on her cat, a few grains dropped and burned in his eyes.

  “And let me tell you,” she said. “I almost fell in that grave when my Henry meowed. Just a little one. I barely heard it. But it was there. I put my hand on his chest and his little heart was beating. Just barely. But it was beating. I couldn’t believe it. The salt brought him back to life.”

  Shit, I thought, the damn vet hadn’t injected enough death juice into the cat. Shit, shit, shit.

  “Oh, that’s awful,” I said.

  “No, I was happy. My cat was alive. Because of the salt. So I called my doctor—”

  “You mean you called the vet?”

  “No, I called my doctor, Ed Marashi, and I told him that it was a miracle, that the salt brought Henry back to life.”

  I wanted to scream at her senile hope. I wanted to run to Lois’s grave and cover her with salt so she’d rise, replace me, and be forced to hear this story. This was her job; this was her responsibility.

  “And let me tell you,” the old woman said. “My doctor was amazed, too, so he said he’d call the vet and they’d both be over, and it wasn’t too long before they were both in my home. Imagine! Two doctors on a house call. That doesn’t happen anymore, does it?”

  It happens when two graceful men want to help a fragile and finite woman.

  And so she told me that the doctors went to work on the cat. And, oh, how they tried to bring him back all the way, but there just wasn’t enough salt in the world to make it happen. So the doctors helped her sing and pray and bury her Henry. And, oh, yes—Dr. Marashi had sworn to her that he’d tried to help her husband with salt.

  “Dr. Marashi said he poured salt on my husband,” she said. “But it didn’t work. There are some people too sick to be salted.”

  She looked around the room as if she expected her husband and cat to materialize. How well can you mourn if you continually forget that the dead are dead?

  I needed to escape.

  “I’m really sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I really am. But I have to get back to the newspaper with these.”

  “Is that my husband’s photograph?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And is that his obituary?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s the one you wrote.”

  “I remember, I remember.”

  She studied the artifacts in my hands.

  “Can I have them back?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The photo, and my letter, that’s all I have to remember my husband. He died, you know?”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “He was at D-Day.”

  “If I give you these back,” I said. “I won’t be able to run them in the newspaper.”

  “Oh, I don’t want them in the newspaper,” she said. “My husband was a very private man.”

  Ah, Lois, I thought, you never told me about this kind of death.

  “I have to go now,” I said. I wanted to crash through the door and run away from this house fire.

  “Okay, okay. Thank you for visiting,” she said. “Will you come back? I love visitors.”

  “Yes,” I said. I lied. I knew I should call somebody about her dementia. She surely couldn’t take care of herself anymore. I knew I should call the police or her doctor or find her children and tell them. I knew I had responsibilities to her—to this grieving and confused stranger—but I was young and terrified.

  So I left her on her porch. She was still waving when I turned the corner. Ah, Lois, I thought, are you with me, are you with me? I drove the newspaper’s car out of the city and onto the freeway. I drove for three hours to the shore of Soap Lake, an inland sea heavy with iron, calcium, and salt. For thousands of years, my indigenous ancestors had traveled here to be healed. They’re all gone now, dead by disease and self-destruction. Why had they believed so strongly in this magic water when it never protected them for long? When it might not have protected them at all? But you, Lois, you were never afraid of death, were you? You laughed and played. And you honored the dead with your brief and serious prayers.

  Standing on the shore, I prayed for my dead. I praised them. I stupidly hoped the lake would heal my small wounds. Then I stripped off my clothes and waded naked into the water.

  Jesus, I don’t want to die today or tomorrow, but I don’t want to live forever.

  ASSIMILATION

  Regarding love, marriage, and sex, both Shakespeare and Sitting Bull knew the only truth: treaties get broken. Therefore, Mary Lynn wanted to have sex with any man other than her husband. For the first time in her life, she wanted to go to bed with an Indian man only because he was Indian. She was a Coeur d’Alene Indian married to a white man; she was a wife who wanted to have sex with an indigenous stranger. She didn’t care about the stranger’s job or his hobbies, or whether he was due for a Cost of Living raise, or owned ten thousand miles of model railroad track. She didn’t care if he was handsome or ugly, mostly because she wasn’t sure exactly what those terms meant anymore and how much relevance they truly had when it came to choosing sexual partners. Oh, she’d married a very handsome man, there was no doubt about that, and she was still attracted to her husband, to his long, graceful fingers, to his arrogance and utter lack of fear in social situations—he’d say anything to anybody—but lately, she’d been forced to concentrate too hard when making love to him. If she didn’t focus completely on him, on the smallest details of his body, then she would drift away from the bed and float around the room like a bored angel. Of course, all this made her feel like a failure, especially since it seemed that her husband had yet to notice her growing disinterest. She wanted to be a good lover, wife, and partner, but she’d obviously developed some form of sexual dyslexia or had picked up a mutant, contagious, and erotic strain of Attention Deficit Disorder. She felt baffled by the complications of sex. She haunted the aisles of bookstores and desperately paged through every book in the self-help section and studied every diagram and chart in the human sensuality encyclopedias. She wanted answers. She wanted to feel it again, whatever it was.

  A few summers ago, during Crow Fair, Mary Lynn had been standing in a Montana supermarket, in the produce aisle, when a homely white woman, her spiky blond hair still wet from a trailer-house shower, walked by in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and though Mary Lynn was straight—having politely declined all three lesbian overtures thrown at her in her life—she’d felt a warm breeze pass through her DNA in that ugly woman’s wake, and had briefly wanted to knock her to the linoleum and do beautiful things to her. Mary Lynn had never before felt such lust—in Montana, of all places, for a white woman who was functionally illiterate and underemployed!—and had not since felt that sensually about any other woman or man.

  Who could explain such things, thes
e vagaries of love? There were many people who would blame Mary Lynn’s unhappiness, her dissatisfaction, on her ethnicity. God, she thought, how simple and earnest was that particular bit of psychotherapy! Yes, she was most certainly a Coeur d’Alene—she’d grown up on the rez, had been very happy during her time there, and had left without serious regrets or full-time enemies—but that wasn’t the only way to define her. She wished that she could be called Coeur d’Alene as a description, rather than as an excuse, reason, prescription, placebo, prediction, or diminutive. She only wanted to be understood as eccentric and complicated!

  Her most cherished eccentricity: when she was feeling her most lonely, she’d put one of the Big Mom Singers’s powwow CDs on the stereo (I’m not afraid of death, hey, ya, hey, death is my cousin, hey, ya, ha, ha) and read from Emily Dickinson’s poetry (Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me—).

  Her most important complication: she was a woman in a turbulent marriage that was threatening to go bad, or had gone bad and might get worse.

  Yes, she was a Coeur d’Alene woman, passionately and dispassionately, who wanted to cheat on her white husband because he was white. She wanted to find an anonymous lover, an Indian man who would fade away into the crowd when she was done with him, a man whose face could appear on the back of her milk carton. She didn’t care if he was the kind of man who knew the punch lines to everybody’s dirty jokes, or if he was the kind of man who read Zane Grey before he went to sleep, or if he was both of those men simultaneously. She simply wanted to find the darkest Indian in Seattle—the man with the greatest amount of melanin—and get naked with him in a cheap motel room. Therefore, she walked up to a flabby Lummi Indian man in a coffee shop and asked him to make love to her.

  “Now,” she said. “Before I change my mind.”

  He hesitated for a brief moment, wondering why he was the chosen one, and then took her by the hand. He decided to believe he was a handsome man.

  “Don’t you want to know my name?” he asked before she put her hand over his mouth.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Don’t say one word. Just take me to the closest motel and fuck me.”