The Reason You're Alive

by Matthew Quick

  But Clayton Fire Bear was now a successful lawyer, I told myself over and over, and you don’t become the head of a law firm by literally scalping white people in America. Metaphorically scalping all types of people is what all lawyers—red or yellow, black or white—do every day of the year, but that’s another story.

  I kept telling myself that Fire Bear was going to be cool about everything as I stretched out in the California king bed Frank made sure I had in my room.

  People always say that old cliché about how you have to walk a day in another man’s moccasins if you want to truly understand him, only no one ever says that about men who actually wear moccasins, meaning real American Indians. So I tried to think about all that had happened from Fire Bear’s point of view, wearing his moccasins, which were uncomfortable on my white feet, to say the least.

  Then I started to think about Jessica again, and the name carved into her underwear drawer.

  I had only slept for an hour by the time the clock said 5:00 a.m. I got the coffee going and then took a hot shower before I lined up my many pills and watched the sun come up over the distant mountains. I sipped coffee and smoked my first morning cigarette—Frank had been kind enough to book us a smoking suite, which still existed in this part of the country. He found me a few minutes later. He was showered and in his suit uniform and smiling over a cup of coffee himself.

  We chowed down on breakfast at the hotel, and everyone there kept thanking me for my service, being that I was in my camouflage and we were in a part of the country where they really know how to treat veterans. I thought of how proud my father was when I took him back to Normandy, and it made me miss the old man something fierce. But I just nodded and smiled at the people who said nice words to me, because there isn’t really a good response to someone thanking you for your service.

  “You ready for this?” Frank said as we finished our bison sausage and eggs.

  I told him that I had remembered the knife, if that was what he was worried about.

  But it turns out he was worried about my emotional state, which was kind of him, so I told him he didn’t need to get his panties in a twist for me. That made him laugh in a good way, and then reach over to swat me on the shoulder twice, the way guys do with their true buddies.

  And then we were in another limo, headed into a small city that I will not name here, but there was snow everywhere, and the white mountains in the distance were lit so bright from the sun, it hurt your eyes to look.

  Next there were tons of people clogging the sidewalks, walking in boots and heavy coats and even ski goggles, which made me think of my neurologist surgeon, asshole that he was.

  The limo stopped in front of a modern-looking building with an all-mirrored-glass front that looked like something you might see in New York City. You could tell that whoever owned the building had class and big-time money, so I had mixed emotions when I saw Fire Bear’s real last name written out in big letters.

  I was glad that a fellow Vietnam veteran had overcome hardship and made something so obviously impressive of himself, but I knew that you never want to fuck with a powerful lawyer who can break your legal kneecaps in a court of law without even hardly trying. If I were going to lawyer up against a man who owned a big-time business like this, I would need more money than I currently had, which was a lot, but nothing compared to men like Frank. I had successful big-boy money, but Frank’s made billions. And from the look of this building, it seemed like Fire Bear was somewhere in between.

  And here I was, walking onto his home field with a knife I stole from him a lifetime ago. I was like a killer strolling into the police station fifty years after committing the crime, holding up the murder weapon the cops had spent their entire careers searching for.

  Frank saw the doubt on my face. “Do you think I would let you do this if there were any possibility whatsoever that it could go sour?” he said.

  I realized this meant that Frank had probably contacted Fire Bear—they might have e-mailed or spoken on the phone. The outcome might be rigged from the start, but I still had to walk through the door and face a soldier I had wronged when I was a young man.

  You don’t have to be a genius to realize that Fire Bear represented much more than our little story—he was symbolic of every fucked-up thing I had ever done in Vietnam, which was a long list, to say the least.

  So I smoked a cigarette out there on the sidewalk, trying to find the courage, as Frank put his arm around me and told me everything was going to be okay. He kept saying I should trust him and that he had my best interests at heart and that I needed to do this because most Vietnam vets never get to right a single one of their wrongs. Frank kept saying over and over that I was doing this for every dumb young American combat veteran who has ever made mistakes, which was all of us, including Fire Bear.

  It took me two more cigarettes to get up the courage. By then, I was so fucking cold from standing out there on the sidewalk that I just wanted to get warm. We went inside, and Frank checked in with the woman behind the desk in the lobby, saying that we were there to meet the big boss, Fire Bear himself. She told us to take a seat on these couches covered in real spotted cowhides.

  Ten minutes later she told us to follow her, so we did that too, taking an elevator ride up to the top floor and then walking down a long hall with pictures of tepees and feather headdresses, along with all the other Indian-related shit that hung on the walls.

  When we got to Fire Bear’s office, there were two cigar-store Indians flanking the door. That made me want to take a picture—Hank always insisted that those were racist, yet Fire Bear had chosen them to guard his office.

  My nemesis was seated behind his desk, his back turned. He was looking out his window, which had a million-dollar view of the distant mountains. The good-looking lady who had escorted us to Fire Bear’s office said, “Mr. Fire Bear, David Granger is here to see you.”

  Fire Bear didn’t respond.

  I looked at Frank. He nodded, meaning I was to go in alone. So I did.

  I heard the door close behind me, and my heart started to pound.

  As I approached, Fire Bear said “Sit,” so I sat in one of two red leather chairs facing his desk. He did not turn around, nor did he speak for what seemed like an eternity, so I told him I had his father’s knife and wanted to return it to him. He didn’t say anything in response.

  He just kept staring out the window, his back turned.

  Fire Bear had aged just like the rest of us. There was a lot of silver in his hair now, and his broad shoulders were slumped, suggesting that time had ground him down a bit too. I got to feeling guilty and ashamed, sitting there in his office, thinking about what I had done to him almost fifty years ago in Vietnam.

  So I started rambling, saying I had orders back in the jungle, I was just a child, and everyone who had been engaged in combat for so many days was legally insane. I heard an urgency in my voice as I tried to defend myself. I could talk to Fire Bear about these things, I realized, because he was a veteran; he had been there.

  Finally, I just said I was sorry. I put the knife on his desk. I told him it was his, and I didn’t want anything for it; I just wanted to give it back.

  Then he asked if I had found his name carved into Jessica’s underwear drawer, which made me shiver. His voice was nothing like I remembered it. The hot anger was no longer there, which was a relief, to say the least.

  I wanted to kill him for presumably breaking into my home all those years ago, but I also wanted to know what the fuck had happened, and why Jessica never told me about any of it.

  When I didn’t say anything, Fire Bear spilled it all without turning around to face me. His voice was so deep and it seemed to scrape the inside of his throat on the way out.

  A few years after his discharge from Fort Riley, he had driven his old pickup truck across the entire country, just to visit our home in New Jersey and make good on his promise to scalp me. He waited until he thought maybe I had forgotten all about him
, using that line about how revenge is a dish best served cold. He entered my home on a weekday afternoon, when he figured I’d be at work, because he wanted to use the knife I had stolen to do the scalping. He had to find it first, and then he would kill me. Part one would be much easier if he could search my home when I wasn’t there. What he didn’t know is that I used to carry his knife on me when I went to work, so he searched my house but couldn’t find shit.

  With a backup knife he had brought with him, Fire Bear carved his name in Jessica’s underwear drawer, hoping she would find it and ask me what it meant, which would force me to either lie or explain the unimaginable shit I did in Vietnam. He also wanted to send me a clear death threat. But as he was finishing that carving, he heard Hank start crying in the other room. Immediately, he knew that the best revenge was to kill my son.

  Fire Bear stood over the crib with the knife in his hand, watching tiny, vulnerable Hank wail. He tried and tried to get up the stones to take revenge on the white man who had humiliated and abused him in the jungle before stealing a family heirloom. Do it! Do it! Do it! he told himself.

  Obviously, Fire Bear never went through with his plan to kill Hank. But the pause he threw into the story at this point was terrible anyway, especially since he hadn’t moved at all. My nemesis sat like a statue, facing the window, the whole time he talked.

  Finally, Fire Bear said, he heard a woman’s voice. When he turned around, he saw Jessica standing in the hallway. She had been in her art studio when he first entered our home. He still had the knife in his hand, so it was pretty clear what he had come to do.

  But then Jessica asked him why he was crying. That shocked Fire Bear because he didn’t realize he was. So he put a hand to his face, and found out that he was indeed crying, and hard.

  That’s when he sort of lost it, falling to his knees, realizing that he was about to kill an innocent child. The knife fell out of his hand, and the next thing he knew, my wife had her arms around him and she was trying to comfort him, which made him cry even harder, because he’d been just about to stab her baby, and here she was trying to make him feel better.

  But Jessica understood what it was like to be angry and depressed and insane from time to time. If he had run up against any other woman, he might be in jail right now. Most women would have called the cops right then and there. But it turns out that Jessica even allowed Fire Bear to hold Hank, and she explained what I had done for them both—that Hank wasn’t even my flesh and blood, but I had pretended to be his father after Brian raped her. Fire Bear said he couldn’t stop crying the whole time, he just sobbed and sobbed, because he felt so bad about what he had come to do and everything his government had forced him to do in the jungle. So Jessica tried to level him out, making him coffee and lunch and then even showing him a few of her paintings in the garage.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and yet it all made so much sense.

  He talked about how her art made him feel, saying it was like she understood what was going on in his mind and heart. Jessica kept showing him more and more images, trying to get him to stop crying, and he said right there in the garage studio he reached out and hugged her and apologized for breaking into her home and trying to kill her baby and also for many other wicked things that he had done in Vietnam too.

  She kept saying she forgave him, and every time she said it, he’d sob even harder until he knew he had to leave because I would surely be home from work soon, and he didn’t think I would forgive him so easily.

  He told Jessica that he forgave me, her husband, and that he would never return. The knife was now a gift that he had given our family. He would never come looking for it again.

  Then he left.

  There was a long silence here. It might have lasted twenty minutes. As you might imagine, neither of us knew what to say. And I was trying to decide whether I could possibly believe this story. As I stared at the back of Fire Bear’s head, I realized he was making himself vulnerable by turning his back to me. Vietnam veterans don’t like to have anyone behind them, out of sight, let alone a potential enemy. Fire Bear was no longer my nemesis. That’s when I decided to trust him.

  Finally I said, “She never told me any of this.”

  “I understand that your wife is no longer with us?” he said, letting me know that Frank had clued him in a bit.

  So I told him what had happened to Jessica, how she not only killed herself when Hank was still just a boy but burned all her paintings, and how Hank was now an art dealer, and his biggest regret in life was never seeing a single one of his own mother’s artworks. I was rambling.

  Eventually I fell quiet. After another long silence, Fire Bear spun his chair around and faced me. There were tears running down his wrinkled face. His once-sharp jawline now sagged, just like mine. He was dressed in a sharp suit that looked exactly like one of Frank’s, and his hair was cut like a white man’s. No braids or feathers or anything like that.

  His eyes fell for a second to the knife on his desk, which he hadn’t seen since he was in Vietnam back in sixty-seven. Then he said he was very sorry for my loss and asked if Frank and I would join him at his house for dinner that evening so that we could break bread and heal old wounds. After all he had shared with me, I agreed to the invitation immediately.

  Then he asked if I would please bring his father’s knife to dinner, because he wanted his son to see it.

  I told him that the knife was his—that I had come all this way to return it.

  He nodded once and said he had given me the knife when Jessica was so kind to him, but would I please bring it to dinner that evening, so his son might at least see it.

  I agreed, thinking I would give it to his son when I met him, because that was the right thing to do. We stood and shook hands over his desk.

  It was funny—in my memory, for decades, I’d thought of Fire Bear towering over me, but he was only an inch taller than yours truly, so just about six feet tall.

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I picked up the knife and said I would bring it that evening. He said his secretary would provide directions to his home and show us out, which she did.

  In the limo I told Frank everything that I had learned. Frank agreed that giving the knife to Fire Bear’s son was the noble thing to do. We immediately went in search of a gay florist so that we could bring Fire Bear’s wife a proper flower arrangement, and we also shopped for high-end wine and Scotch.

  Time passed strangely that day, both quickly and slowly. The part of me that just wanted to give the knife to Fire Bear’s son and then go home felt like the day went on forever. But another part of me was afraid of facing Fire Bear’s family, wondering if they knew how cruel I had been to him during the war, and that part felt like time was flying by.

  Soon enough we were back in the limousine, headed to Fire Bear’s place, which was outside the city, closer to the mountains. His house was more like a log-cabin castle that sat upon a few hundred acres.

  When Frank and I went inside, we were surprised to find Fire Bear’s entire family there—his wife, three daughters, son, their spouses, and ten or so grandchildren, ages infant to maybe seventeen. I don’t remember all of the names, and I wouldn’t list them here now anyway. But we were introduced all around, and Fire Bear—who wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a flannel shirt now—kept saying I was his “friend” from the Vietnam War. That’s when I realized that he had never told the truth about me to his family—or the truth about himself.

  All the kissing and handshaking made me feel so welcome, I was embarrassed. None of them asked why I was in full camouflage, either, although I did show off my scar, and we talked about my surgery at length.

  Scanning Fire Bear’s children and grandchildren, I saw that he was lucky—there were no Agent Orange birth defects. He’d been exposed at least as much as I had. And he hadn’t gotten the cancer, either. Maybe God was trying to even things out a bit, being that he was born Indian, and already had enough hardship to manage. />
  Dinner was delicious. We all sat around a twenty-foot-long table that Fire Bear and his son had made by hand, and ate steaks cut from cows that Fire Bear’s family had raised and slaughtered themselves. All of it was organic and grass-fed, and I wished Hank could have been there, because there was no way in hell he would have had the balls to tell a real live American Indian that eating the cows he’d raised himself was not heart-healthy.

  Frank carried the conversation, asking them all what they did for a living and how they liked living in the area and all of those sorts of questions. Our wine and Scotch and flowers were a big hit, and it was nice to be around Fire Bear’s family, all of whom seemed to be good Americans.

  After some apple pie, which Fire Bear had to explain was a joke that his family had come up with, serving apple pie to the white guests—not a very funny joke, unfortunately—Fire Bear asked if his son could see the knife I stole decades ago, only he didn’t say I stole it.

  I immediately produced the knife and handed it to his son, who was about Hank’s age, maybe a few years younger, but already had three sons of his own.

  Fire Bear’s son looked over the knife and announced that he would like to have it. Before I could tell him that it was already his, he asked if he might trade for the knife. A hush fell over the room. It began to feel like everyone was about to sing happy birthday to someone, or maybe like the moment you let your grandchildren see all the presents under the tree on Christmas morning. I could tell that these Indians had a surprise for me, but at first I had no idea what it could be.

  “Would you consider trading me for this knife?” Fire Bear’s son said again, only now he was smiling ear to ear, showing off his remarkably white teeth.

  It was obvious that we were doing a bit of theater here, and I had been to enough musicals to know when the happy ending was about to occur. The audience can always feel these things, and I was obviously the audience for this little almost-all-Indian play—almost, because I now understood that Frank was performing too, definitely in cahoots with these remarkably nice people.