The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. My father always 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 a powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She broke three ribs, and my mother always said those ribs never healed right, and tumors take over when you don’t heal right.

  Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and the salt and the vomit, I wondered if my grandmother's cancer 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 whether 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 P. M.

  Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, supports cultural projects that empower the poor and the 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. It exists to provide a voice for 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 paper. You buy each copy for thirty cents and sell it for a dollar, and you keep the 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 his 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 person who calls me that. He's a funny and kind man.

  I told him about my grandmother's powwow regalia and how much money I needed in order 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 the most papers sold in one 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.

  “And 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.”

  “O.K.,” 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 P. M.

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

  I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five in a garbage can, and walked into 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 me to stay alive.

  6 P. M.

  With one dollar in my pocket, I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out, and 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 thirteen, my grandmother told me a story about the Second World War. She was a nurse at a military hospital in Sydney, Australia. For two years, she healed and comforted American and Australian soldiers.

  One day she tended to a wounded Maori soldier, who had lost his legs to an artillery attack. He was very dark-skinned. His hair was black and curly and his eyes were black and warm. His face was 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 fighting in Germany, and I lost another brother on Okinawa.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I was on Okinawa as well. It was terrible.”

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

  “It's funny, isn’t it?” he said.

  “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 at 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 my two dollars and fifty cents and walked to the Korean grocery store in Pioneer Square.

  7 P.M.

  At 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 Mary, the young Korean woman who worked the register. She was the daughter of the owners, and she 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.”

  “O.K.,” 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.”

  “O.K.,” 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. I could only win five hundred dollars now, and that would only be half of what I needed.

  Ten minutes after I lost, I scratched the other ticket and won a free ticket—a small consolation and one more chance to win some money.

  I walked back to Mary.
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  “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 took it outside. I like to scratch my tickets in private. Hopeful and sad, I scratched that third ticket and won real money. I carried it back inside to Mary.

  “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 Mary and walked out into the cold night air.

  8 P. M.

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

  9 P. M.

  Lonesome 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 Hearts 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 into Big Hearts 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 woman, 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 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.

  “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 as if I was supposed to kiss it. So I did. He giggled and blushed, as much 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 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.

  “You better be careful,” Irene said. “Honey Boy knows all sorts of magic.”

  “Honey Boy,” I said, “you can try to seduce me, but my heart belongs to a woman named Mary.”

  “Is your Mary a virgin?” Honey Boy asked.

  We laughed.

  And we drank our whiskey shots until they were gone. But the other Indians bought me more whiskey shots, because I’d been so generous with my money. And Honey Boy pulled out his credit card, and I drank and sailed on that plastic boat.

  After a dozen shots, I asked Irene to dance. She refused. But Honey Boy shuffled over to the jukebox, dropped in a quarter, and selected Willie Nelson's “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” As Irene and I sat at the table and laughed and drank more whiskey, Honey Boy danced a slow circle around us and sang along with Willie.

  “Are you serenading me?” I asked him.

  He kept singing and dancing.

  “Are you serenading me?” I asked him again.

  “He's going to put a spell on you,” Irene said.

  I leaned over the table, spilling a few drinks, and kissed Irene hard. She kissed me back.

  10 P.M.

  Irene pushed me into the women's bathroom, into a stall, shut the door behind us, and shoved her hand down my pants. She was short, so I had to lean over to kiss her. I grabbed and squeezed her everywhere I could reach, and she was wonderfully fat, and every part of her body felt like a large, warm, soft breast.

  MIDNIGHT

  Nearly blind with alcohol, I stood alone at the bar and swore I had been standing in the bathroom with Irene only a minute ago.

  “One more shot!” I yelled at the bartender. “You’ve got no more money!” he yelled back. “Somebody buy me a drink!” I shouted. “They’ve got no more money!” “Where are Irene and Honey Boy?” “Long gone!”

  2 A.M.

  “Closing time!” the bartender shouted at the three or four Indians who were still drinking hard after a long, hard day of drinking. Indian alcoholics are either sprinters or marathoners.

  “Where are Irene and Honey Boy?” I asked.

  “They’ve been gone for hours,” the bartender said.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “I told you a hundred times, I don’t know.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “It's closing time. I don’t care where you go, but you’re not staying here.”

  “You are an ungrateful bastard. I’ve been good to you.”

  “You don’t leave right now, I’m going to kick your ass.”

  “Come on, I know how to fight.”

  He came at me. I don’t remember what happened after that.

  4 A.M.

  I emerged from the blackness and discovered myself walking behind a big warehouse. I didn’t know where I was. My face hurt. I felt my nose and decided that it might be broken. Exhausted and cold, I pulled a plastic tarp from a truck bed, wrapped it around me like a faithful lover, and fell asleep in the dirt.

  6 A.M.

  Somebody kicked me in the ribs. I opened my eyes and looked up at a white cop.

  “Jackson,” the cop said. “Is that you?”

  “Officer Williams,” I said. He was a good cop with a sweet tooth. He’d given me hundreds of candy bars over the years. I wonder if he knew I was diabetic.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I was cold and sleepy,” I said. “So I lay down.”

  “You dumb-ass, you passed out on the railroad tracks.”

  I sat up and looked around. I was lying on the railroad tracks. Dock-workers stared at me. I should have been a railroad-track pizza, a double Indian pepperoni with extra cheese. Sick and scared, I leaned over and puked whiskey.

  “What the hell's wrong with you?” Officer Williams asked. “You’ve never been this stupid.”

  �
��It's my grandmother,” I said. “She died.”

  “I’m sorry, man. When did she die?”

  “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  “And you’re killing yourself now?”

  “I’ve been killing myself ever since she died.”

  He shook his head. He was sad for me. Like I said, he was a good cop.

  “And somebody beat the hell out of you,” he said. “You remember who?”

  “Mr. Grief and I went a few rounds.”

  “It looks like Mr. Grief knocked you out.”

  “Mr. Grief always wins.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Let's get you out of here.”

  He helped me up and led me over to his squad car. He put me in the back. “You throw up in there and you’re cleaning it up,” he said.

  “That's fair.”

  He walked around the car and sat in the driver's seat. “I’m taking you over to detox,” he said.

  “No, man, that place is awful,” I said. “It's full of drunk Indians.”

  We laughed. He drove away from the docks.

  “I don’t know how you guys do it,” he said.

  “What guys?” I asked.

  “You Indians. How the hell do you laugh so much? I just picked your ass off the railroad tracks, and you’re making jokes. Why the hell do you do that?”

  “The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”

  We laughed.

  “Listen to you, Jackson. You’re so smart. Why the hell are you on the street?”

  “Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll tell you.”

  “You bet I’d give you a thousand dollars if I knew you’d straighten up your life.”

  He meant it. He was the second-best cop I’d ever known.

  “You’re a good cop,” I said.

  “Come on, Jackson,” he said. “Don’t blow smoke up my ass.”

  “No, really, you remind me of my grandfather.”

  “Yeah, that's what you Indians always tell me.”

  “No, man, my grandfather was a tribal cop. He was a good cop. He never arrested people. He took care of them. Just like you.”