Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “There’s only one way to know for sure,” I said.

  So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the old white man working behind the counter.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “That’s my grandmother’s powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Somebody stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been looking for it ever since.”

  The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops are filled with liars.

  “I’m not lying,” I said. “Ask my friends here. They’ll tell you.”

  “He’s the most honest Indian I know,” Rose of Sharon said.

  “All right, honest Indian,” the pawnbroker said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Can you prove it’s your grandmother’s regalia?”

  Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on their regalia. But we always hid it where you had to search hard to find it.

  “If it really is my grandmother’s,” I said, “there will be one yellow bead hidden somewhere on it.”

  “All right, then,” the pawnbroker said. “Let’s take a look.”

  He pulled the regalia out of the window, laid it down on his glass counter, and we searched for that yellow bead and found it hidden beneath the armpit.

  “There it is,” the pawnbroker said. He didn’t sound surprised. “You were right. This is your grandmother’s regalia.”

  “It’s been missing for fifty years,” Junior said.

  “Hey, Junior,” I said. “It’s my family’s story. Let me tell it.”

  “All right,” he said. “I apologize. You go ahead.”

  “It’s been missing for fifty years,” I said.

  “That’s his family’s sad story,” Rose of Sharon said. “Are you going to give it back to him?”

  “That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t give away a thousand dollars.”

  “We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.

  “Hey,” I said to her, “don’t go threatening people.”

  The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking hard about the possibilities.

  “Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said.”

  He sounded sad about that. Like he was sorry for taking advantage of our disadvantages.

  “What’s your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.

  “Jackson,” I said.

  “Is that first or last?” he asked.

  “Both.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, it’s true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jackson. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family is funny.”

  “All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a thousand dollars, would you?”

  “We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” he said and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar. It would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”

  “We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.

  “That’s too bad,” he said again and thought harder about the possibilities. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow with the money, and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds good,” I said.

  “All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here’s twenty bucks to get you started.”

  He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.

  1:00 P.M.

  Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7–Eleven and spent it to buy three bottles of imagination. We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in one day. Thinking hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off those bottles one, two, and three.

  2:00 P.M.

  Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke. I heard later she had hitchhiked back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.

  Junior was passed out beside me, covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else’s vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him alone and walked down to the water. I loved the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.

  When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen north ever since.

  These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back.

  “How long has your boat been gone?” I asked.

  “Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said.

  I cried with them for a while.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?”

  They didn’t.

  3:00 P.M.

  I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out. I put my face down near his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was alive, so I dug around in his blue-jean pockets and found half a cigarette. I smoked it all the way down and thought about my grandmother.

  Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. My father thought Agnes caught her tumors from the uranium mine on the reservation. But my mother said the disease started when Agnes was walking back from the powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She broke three ribs, and my mother said those ribs never healed right, and tumors always take over when you don’t heal right.

  Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and salt and vomit, I wondered if my grandmother’s cancer had started when somebody stole her powwow regalia. Maybe the cancer started in her broken heart and then leaked out into her breasts. I know it’s crazy, but I wondered if I could bring my grandmother back to life if I bought back her regalia.

  I needed money, big money, so I left Junior and walked over to the Real Change office.

  4:00 P.M.

  “Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, supports cultural projects that empower the poor and homeless, and mobilizes the public around poverty issues. Real Change’s mission is to organize, educate, and build alliances to create solutions to homelessness and poverty. They exist to provide a voice to poor people in our community.”

  I memorized Real Change’s mission statement because I sometimes sell the newspaper on the streets. But you have to stay sober to sell it, and I’m not always good at staying sober. Anybody can sell the newspaper. You buy each copy for thirty cents and sell it for a dollar and keep the net profit.

  “I need one thousand four hundred and thirty papers,” I said to the Big Boss.

  “That’s a strange number,” he said. “And that’s a lot of papers.”

  “I need them.”

  The Big Boss pulled out the calculator and did the math. “It will cost you four hundred and twenty-nine dollars for that many,” he said.

  “If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t need to sell the papers.”

  “What’s going on, Jackson-to-the-Second-Power
?” he asked. He is the only one who calls me that. He is a funny and kind man.

  I told him about my grandmother’s powwow regalia and how much money I needed to buy it back.

  “We should call the police,” he said.

  “I don’t want to do that,” I said. “It’s a quest now. I need to win it back by myself.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And to be honest, I’d give you the papers to sell if I thought it would work. But the record for most papers sold in a day by one vendor is only three hundred and two.”

  “That would net me about two hundred bucks,” I said.

  The Big Boss used his calculator. “Two hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents,” he said.

  “That’s not enough,” I said.

  “The most money anybody has made in one day is five hundred and twenty-five. And that’s because somebody gave Old Blue five hundred-dollar bills for some dang reason. The average daily net is about thirty dollars.”

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “No.”

  “Can you lend me some money?”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “If I lend you money, I have to lend money to everybody.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I’ll give you fifty papers for free. But don’t tell anybody I did it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He gathered up the newspapers and handed them to me. I held them to my chest. He hugged me. I carried the newspapers back toward the water.

  5:00 P.M.

  Back on the wharf, I stood near the Bainbridge Island Terminal and tried to sell papers to business commuters walking onto the ferry.

  I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five into a garbage can, and walked into the McDonald’s, ordered four cheeseburgers for a dollar each, and slowly ate them.

  After eating, I walked outside and vomited on the sidewalk. I hated to lose my food so soon after eating it. As an alcoholic Indian with a busted stomach, I always hope I can keep enough food in my stomach to stay alive.

  6:00 P.M.

  With one dollar in my pocket, I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out, so I put my ear to his chest and listened for his heartbeat. He was alive, so I took off his shoes and socks and found one dollar in his left sock and fifty cents in his right sock. With two dollars and fifty cents in my hand, I sat beside Junior and thought about my grandmother and her stories.

  When I was sixteen, my grandmother told me a story about World War II. She was a nurse at a military hospital in Sydney, Australia. Over the course of two years, she comforted and healed U.S. and Australian soldiers.

  One day, she tended to a wounded Maori soldier. He was very dark-skinned. His hair was black and curly, and his eyes were black and warm. His face with covered with bright tattoos.

  “Are you Maori?” he asked my grandmother.

  “No,” she said. “I’m Spokane Indian. From the United States.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I have heard of your tribes. But you are the first American Indian I have ever met.”

  “There’s a lot of Indian soldiers fighting for the United States,” she said. “I have a brother still fighting in Germany, and I lost another brother on Okinawa.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I was on Okinawa as well. It was terrible.” He had lost his legs to an artillery attack.

  “I am sorry about your legs,” my grandmother said.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What’s funny?”

  “How we brown people are killing other brown people so white people will remain free.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Well, sometimes I think of it that way. And other times, I think of it the way they want me to think of it. I get confused.”

  She fed him morphine.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” he asked.

  “Which heaven?” she asked.

  “I’m talking about the heaven where my legs are waiting for me.”

  They laughed.

  “Of course,” he said, “my legs will probably run away from me when I get to heaven. And how will I ever catch them?”

  “You have to get your arms strong,” my grandmother said. “So you can run on your hands.”

  They laughed again.

  Sitting beside Junior, I laughed with the memory of my grandmother’s story. I put my hand close to Junior’s mouth to make sure he was still breathing. Yes, Junior was alive, so I took his two dollars and fifty cents and walked to the Korean grocery store over in Pioneer Square.

  7:00 P.M.

  In the Korean grocery store, I bought a fifty-cent cigar and two scratch lottery tickets for a dollar each. The maximum cash prize was five hundred dollars a ticket. If I won both, I would have enough money to buy back the regalia.

  I loved Kay, the young Korean woman who worked the register. She was the daughter of the owners and sang all day.

  “I love you,” I said when I handed her the money.

  “You always say you love me,” she said.

  “That’s because I will always love you.”

  “You are a sentimental fool.”

  “I’m a romantic old man.”

  “Too old for me.”

  “I know I’m too old for you, but I can dream.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I agree to be a part of your dreams, but I will only hold your hand in your dreams. No kissing and no sex. Not even in your dreams.”

  “Okay,” I said. “No sex. Just romance.”

  “Good-bye, Jackson Jackson, my love, I will see you soon.”

  I left the store, walked over to Occidental Park, sat on a bench, and smoked my cigar all the way down.

  Ten minutes after I finished the cigar, I scratched my first lottery ticket and won nothing. So I could win only five hundred dollars now, and that would be just half of what I needed.

  Ten minutes later, I scratched my other lottery ticket and won a free ticket, a small consolation and one more chance to win money.

  I walked back to Kay.

  “Jackson Jackson,” she said. “Have you come back to claim my heart?”

  “I won a free ticket,” I said.

  “Just like a man,” she said. “You love money and power more than you love me.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “And I’m sorry it’s true.”

  She gave me another scratch ticket, and I carried it outside. I liked to scratch my tickets in private. Hopeful and sad, I scratched that third ticket and won real money. I carried it back inside to Kay.

  “I won a hundred dollars,” I said.

  She examined the ticket and laughed. “That’s a fortune,” she said and counted out five twenties. Our fingertips touched as she handed me the money. I felt electric and constant.

  “Thank you,” I said and gave her one of the bills.

  “I can’t take that,” she said. “It’s your money.”

  “No, it’s tribal. It’s an Indian thing. When you win, you’re supposed to share with your family.”

  “I’m not your family.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  She smiled. She kept the money. With eighty dollars in my pocket, I said good-bye to my dear Kay and walked out into the cold night air.

  8:00 P.M.

  I wanted to share the good news with Junior. I walked back to him, but he was gone. I later heard he had hitchhiked down to Portland, Oregon, and died of exposure in an alley behind the Hilton Hotel.

  9:00 P.M.

  Lonely for Indians, I carried my eighty dollars over to Big Heart’s in South Downtown. Big Heart’s is an all-Indian bar. Nobody knows how or why Indians migrate to one bar and turn it into an official Indian bar. But Big Heart’s has been an Indian bar for twenty-three years. It used to be way up on Aurora Avenue, but a crazy Lummi Indian burned that one down, and the owners moved to the new location, a few blocks south of Safeco Field.

  I walked inside Big Heart’s and counted fifteen Indians, eight men and
seven women. I didn’t know any of them, but Indians like to belong, so we all pretended to be cousins.

  “How much for whiskey shots?” I asked the bartender, a fat white guy.

  “You want the bad stuff or the badder stuff?”

  “As bad as you got.”

  “One dollar a shot.”

  I laid my eighty dollars on the bar top.

  “All right,” I said. “Me and all my cousins here are going to be drinking eighty shots. How many is that apiece?”

  “Counting you,” a woman shouted from behind me, “that’s five shots for everybody.”

  I turned to look at her. She was a chubby and pale Indian sitting with a tall and skinny Indian man.

  “All right, math genius,” I said to her and then shouted for the whole bar to hear. “Five drinks for everybody!”

  All of the other Indians rushed the bar, but I sat with the mathematician and her skinny friend. We took our time with our whiskey shots.

  “What’s your tribe?” I asked them.

  “I’m Duwamish,” she said. “And he’s Crow.”

  “You’re a long way from Montana,” I said to him.

  “I’m Crow,” he said. “I flew here.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked them.

  “I’m Irene Muse,” she said. “And this is Honey Boy.”

  She shook my hand hard, but he offered his hand like I was supposed to kiss it. So I kissed it. He giggled and blushed as well as a dark-skinned Crow can blush.

  “You’re one of them two-spirits, aren’t you?” I asked him.

  “I love women,” he said. “And I love men.”

  “Sometimes both at the same time,” Irene said.

  We laughed.

  “Man,” I said to Honey Boy. “So you must have about eight or nine spirits going on inside of you, enit?”

  “Sweetie,” he said, “I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”

  “Oh, no,” Irene said. “Honey Boy is falling in love.”

  “It has nothing to do with love,” he said.

  We laughed.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’m flattered, Honey Boy, but I don’t play on your team.”

  “Never say never,” he said.