“Fucking Indians,” the trooper said as he threw the sandwich bag of pennies back into our car, sending them flying all over the interior. “And keep your damn change.”
We watched him walk back to his cruiser, climb in, and drive off, breaking four or five laws as he flipped a U-turn, left rubber, crossed the center line, broke the speed limit, and ran through a stop sign without lights and siren.
We laughed as we picked up the scattered pennies from the floor of the car. It was a good thing that the trooper threw that change back at us because we found just enough gas money to get us home.
After Norma left me, I’d occasionally get postcards from powwows all over the country. She missed me in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. I just stayed on the Spokane Indian Reservation and missed her from the doorway of my HUD house, from the living room window, waiting for the day that she would come back.
But that’s how Norma operated. She told me once that she would leave me whenever the love started to go bad.
“I ain’t going to watch the whole thing collapse,” she said. “I’ll get out when the getting is good.”
“You wouldn’t even try to save us?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t be worth saving at that point.”
“That’s pretty cold.”
“That’s not cold,” she said. “It’s practical.”
But don’t get me wrong, either. Norma was a warrior in every sense of the word. She would drive a hundred miles round-trip to visit tribal elders in the nursing homes in Spokane. When one of those elders died, Norma would weep violently, throw books and furniture.
“Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away,” she said. “And that hurts more because I don’t know how much of a future we have.”
And once, when we drove up on a really horrible car wreck, she held a dying man’s head in her lap and sang to him until he passed away. He was a white guy, too. Remember that. She kept that memory so close to her that she had nightmares for a year.
“I always dream that it’s you who’s dying,” she told me and didn’t let me drive the car for almost a year.
Norma, she was always afraid; she wasn’t afraid.
One thing that I noticed in the hospital as I coughed myself up and down the bed: A clock, at least one of those old-style clocks with hands and a face, looks just like somebody laughing if you stare at it long enough.
The hospital released me because they decided that I would be much more comfortable at home. And there I was, at home, writing letters to my loved ones on special reservation stationery that read: FROM THE DEATHBED OF JAMES MANY HORSES, III.
But in reality, I sat at my kitchen table to write, and DEATH TABLE just doesn’t have the necessary music. I’m also the only James Many Horses, but there is a certain dignity to any kind of artificial tradition.
Anyway, I sat there at the death table, writing letters from my deathbed, when there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” I yelled, knowing the door was locked, and smiled when it rattled against the frame.
“It’s locked,” a female voice said and it was a female voice I recognized.
“Norma?” I asked as I unlocked and opened the door.
She was beautiful. She had either gained or lost twenty pounds, one braid hung down a little longer than the other, and she had ironed her shirt until the creases were sharp.
“Honey,” she said. “I’m home.”
I was silent. That was a rare event.
“Honey,” she said. “I’ve been gone so long and I missed you so much. But now I’m back. Where I belong.”
I had to smile.
“Where are the kids?” she asked.
“They’re asleep,” I said, recovered just in time to continue the joke. “Poor little guys tried to stay awake, you know? They wanted to be up when you got home. But, one by one, they dropped off, fell asleep, and I had to carry them off into their little beds.”
“Well,” Norma said. “I’ll just go in and kiss them quietly. Tell them how much I love them. Fix the sheets and blankets so they’ll be warm all night.”
She smiled.
“Jimmy,” she said. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’m sorry I left.”
“Where’ve you been?” I asked, though I didn’t really want to know.
“In Arlee. Lived with a Flathead cousin of mine.”
“Cousin as in cousin? Or cousin as in I-was-fucking-him-but-don’t-want-to-tell-you-because-you’re-dying?”
She smiled even though she didn’t want to.
“Well,” she said. “I guess you’d call him more of that second kind of cousin.”
Believe me: nothing ever hurt more. Not even my tumors which are the approximate size of baseballs.
“Why’d you come back?” I asked her.
She looked at me, tried to suppress a giggle, then broke out into full-fledged laugher. I joined her.
“Well,” I asked her again after a while. “Why’d you come back?”
She turned stoic, gave me that beautiful Tonto face, and said, “Because he was so fucking serious about everything.”
We laughed a little more and then I asked her one more time, “Really, why’d you come back?”
“Because someone needs to help you die the right way,” she said. “And we both know that dying ain’t something you ever done before.”
I had to agree with that.
“And maybe,” she said, “because making fry bread and helping people die are the last two things Indians are good at.”
“Well,” I said. “At least you’re good at one of them.”
And we laughed.
INDIAN COUNTRY
Low Man Smith stepped off the airplane in Missoula, Montana, walked up the humid jetway, and entered the air-conditioned terminal. He was excited that he was about to see her, Carlotta, the Navajo woman who lived on the Flathead Indian Reservation. All during the flight from Seattle, he’d been wondering what he would first say to her, this poet who taught English at the Flathead Indian College, and had carried on a fierce and exhausting internal debate on the matter. He’d finally decided, just as the plane touched down, to begin his new life with a simple declaration: “Thank you for inviting me.”
He practiced those five words in his head—thank you for inviting me—and chastised himself for not learning to say them in her language, in Navajo, in Dine.
He was a Coeur d’Alene Indian, even though his mother was white. He’d been born and raised in Seattle, didn’t speak his own tribal language, and had visited his home reservation only six times in his life. His mother had often tried to push Low Man toward the reservation, toward his cousins, aunts, and uncles—all of those who had survived one war or another—but Low Man just wasn’t interested, especially after his Coeur d’Alene father died of a heart attack while welding together one of the last great ships in Elliott Bay. More accurately, Low Man’s father had drowned after his heart attack had knocked him unconscious and then off the boat into the water.
Low Man believed the Coeur d’Alene Reservation to be a monotonous place—a wet kind of monotony that white tourists saw as spiritual and magic. Tourists snapped off dozens of photographs and tried to capture it—the wet, spiritual monotony—before they climbed back into their rental cars and drove away to the next reservation on their itineraries.
The tourists didn’t know, and never would have guessed, that the reservation’s monotony might last for months, sometimes years, before one man would eventually pull a pistol from a secret place and shoot another man in the face, or before a group of women would drag another woman out of her house and beat her left eye clean out of her skull. After that first act of violence, rival families would issue calls for revenge and organize the retaliatory beatings. Afterward, three or four people would wash the blood from their hands and hide in the hills, causing white men to write editorials, all of this news im
mediately followed by capture, trial, verdict, and bus ride to prison. And then, only then, would the long silence, the monotony, resume.
Walking through the Missoula airport, Low Man wondered if the Flathead Reservation was a dangerous place, if it was a small country where the king established a new set of laws with every sunrise.
Carrying a suitcase and computer bag, Low Man searched for Carlotta’s face, her round, purple-dark face, in the crowd of people—most of them white men in cowboy hats—who waited at the gate. Instead, he saw an old Indian man holding a hardcover novel above his head.
“I wrote that book,” Low Man said proudly to the old man, who stood with most of his weight balanced on his left hip.
“You’re him, then,” said the old man. “The mystery writer.”
“I am, then,” said Low Man.
“I’m Carlotta’s boss, Raymond. She sent me.”
“It’s good to meet you, Ray. Where is she?”
“My name is Raymond. And she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah, gone.”
Low Man wondered if gone carried a whole different meaning in the state of Montana. Perhaps, under the Big Sky, being gone meant that you were having lunch, or that your car had run out of gas, or that you’d broken your leg in a fly-fishing accident and were stranded in a hospital bed, doped up on painkillers, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the man you loved more than anything else in the world.
“Where, exactly, is gone?” asked Low Man.
The old man’s left eye was cloudy with glaucoma. Low Man wondered about the quality of Raymond’s depth perception.
“She got married yesterday,” said the old man. “She and Chuck woke up before sunrise and drove for Flagstaff.”
“Flagstaff?” asked Low Man, desperately trying to remember when he had last talked to Carlotta. When? Three days ago, for just a minute, to confirm the details of his imminent arrival.
“Arizona?” Low Man asked.
“Yeah, that’s where she and Chuck grew up.”
“Who is Chuck?”
“That’s her husband,” said Raymond.
“Obviously.”
Low Man needed a drink. He’d been sober for ten years, but he still needed a drink. Not of alcohol, no, but of something. He never worried about falling off the wagon, not anymore. He had spent many nights in hotel rooms where the mini-bars were filled with booze, but had given in only to the temptations of the three-dollar candy bars.
“Ray,” said Low Man. “Can we, please, just put a hold on this conversation while I go find me a pop?”
“Carlotta’s been sober for six years,” said the old man.
“Yes, I know. That’s one of the reasons I came here.”
“She told me you drank a lot of soda pop. Said it was your substitute addiction.”
Shaking his head, Low Man found a snack bar, ordered a large soda, finished it with three swallows, and then ordered another.
When he was working on a book, when he was writing, Low Man would drink a six-pack of soda every hour or so, and then, hopped up on the caffeine, he’d pound the keyboard, chapter after chapter, until carpal tunnel syndrome fossilized the bones in his wrists. There it was, the central dilemma of his warrior life: repetitive stress. In his day, Crazy Horse had to worry about Custer and the patriotic sociopaths of the Seventh Cavalry.
“Okay,” said Low Man. “Now, tell me, please, Raymond, how long has Carlotta been planning on getting married?”
“Oh, jeez,” said Raymond. “She wasn’t planning it at all. But Chuck showed up a couple days back, they were honeyhearts way back when, and just swept her off her feet. He’s been sober for eleven years.”
“One more than me.”
“Oh, yeah, but I don’t think that was the reason she married him.”
“No, I imagine not.”
“Well, I better get going. I got to pick up my grandchildren from school.”
“Ray?”
“It’s Raymond.”
Low Man wondered what had happened to the Indian men who loved their nicknames, who earned their nicknames? His father had run around with indigenous legends named Bug, Mouse, Stubby, and Stink-Head.
“You’re an elder, right?” Low Man asked Raymond.
“Elder than some, not as elder as others.”
“Elders know things, right?”
“I know one or two things.”
“Then perhaps, just perhaps, you could tell me what, what, what thing I’m supposed to do now?”
Raymond scratched his head and pursed his lips.
“Maybe,” said the elder. “You could sign my book for me?”
Distracted, Low Man signed the book, but with his true signature and not with the stylized flourish he’d practiced for years. He signed it: Peace.
“You’re a pretty good writer,” Raymond said. “You should keep doing it.”
“I’ll try,” said Low Man as he watched the old Indian shuffle away.
Low Man began to laugh, softly at first, but then with a full-throated roar that echoed off the walls. He laughed until tears ran down his face, until his stomach cramped, until he retched and threw up in a water fountain. He could not stop laughing, not even after three security officers arrived to escort him out of the airport, and not even after he’d walked three miles into town and found himself standing in a phone booth outside a 7-Eleven.
“Shit,” he said and suddenly grew serious. “Who am I supposed to call?”
Then he laughed a little more and wondered how he was going to tell this story in the future. He’d change the names of those involved, of course, and invent new personalities and characters—and brand-new desires as well—and then he would be forced to invert and subvert the chronology of events, and the tone of the story would certainly be tailored to fit the audience. Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons. Maybe Low Man would turn himself into a blue-collar Indian, a welder who’d quit a good job, who’d quit a loyal wife, to fly to Missoula in pursuit of a crazy white woman.
And because he was a mystery writer, Low Man would have to throw a dead body into the mix.
Whose body? Which weapon?
Pistol, knife, poison, Low Man thought, as he stood in the phone booth outside the Missoula 7-Eleven.
“Chuck?” he asked the telephone. “Who the fuck is Chuck?”
The telephone didn’t answer.
Low Man’s last book, Red Rain, had shipped 125,000 copies in hardcover, good enough to flirt with the New York Times best-seller list, before falling into the Kingdom of Remainders. He belonged to seven frequent-flier clubs, diligently tossed money into his SEP-IRA, and tried to ignore the ulcer just beginning to open a hole in his stomach.
“Okay,” said Low Man as he stood in the telephone booth. “Crazy Horse didn’t need Tums. Okay? Think.”
He took a deep breath. He wondered if the world was a cruel place. He checked the contents of his wallet. He carried two hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards, and a valid driver’s license, all the ingredients necessary for renting a car and driving back to Seattle.
He doubted they were going to let him back into the airport, a thought that made him break into more uncontrolled laughter.
Jesus, he’d always wanted to be the kind of Indian who didn’t get kicked out of public places. He played golf, for God’s sake, with a single-digit handicap.
Opening the phone book, Low Man looked for the local bookstores. He figured a small town like Missoula might have a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton’s, but he needed something more intimate and eccentric, even sacred. Low Man prayed for a used bookstore, a good one, a musty church filled with bibles written by thousands of disciples. There, in that kind of place, he knew that he could buy somebody’s novel or book of poems, then sit down in a comfortable chair to read, and maybe drink a cup of good coffee or a tall glass of the local water.
He found the listing for a bookstore called Bread and Books. Bea
utiful. He tore the page out of the directory and walked into the 7-Eleven.
“Hey,” said Low Man as he slapped the yellow page on the counter. “Where is this place?”
The cashier, a skinny white kid, smiled.
“You tore that out of the phone book, didn’t you?”asked the kid.
“Yes, I did,” said Low Man.
“You’re going to have to pay for that.”
Low Man knew the telephone directory was free because merchants paid to advertise in the damn things.
“Fine,” said Low Man and set his suitcase on the counter. “I’ll trade you this yellow page for everything inside this suitcase. Hell, you can have the suitcase, too, if you tell me where to find this place.”
“Breads?”
A good sign. It was a place popular enough to have a diminutive.
“Yeah, do you read?” asked Low Man.
“Of course.”
“What do you read?”
“Comic books.”
“What kind of comics?”
“Not comics,” said the kid. “Comic books.”
“Okay,” said Low Man. “What kind of comic books?”
“Good ones. Daredevil, Preacher, Love and Rockets, Astro City.”
“Do you read mysteries?”
“You mean, like, murder mysteries?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“No, not really.”
“Well, I got a mystery for you anyway,” said Low Man as he pushed the suitcase a few inches across the counter, closer to the cashier.
“This is a suitcase,” said Low Man.
“I know it’s a suitcase.”
“I just want you to know,” said Low Man as he patted the suitcase, as he tapped a slight rhythm against the lock. “I just need you to understand, understand this, understand that there are only two kinds of suitcase.”
“Really?” asked the cashier. He was making only six bucks an hour, not enough to be speaking metaphysically with a total stranger, and an Indian stranger at that.
Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories Page 16