فصل 7

Red Versus White

You probably think I’ve completely fallen in love with white people and that I don’t see anything good in Indians.

Well, that’s false.

I love my big sister. I think she’s double crazy and random.

Ever since she moved, she’s sent me all these great Montana postcards. Beautiful landscapes and beautiful Indians. Buffalo. Rivers. Huge insects.

Great postcards.

She still can’t find a job, and she’s still living in that crappy little trailer. But she’s happy and working hard on her book. She made a New Year’s resolution to finish her book by summertime.

Her book is about hope, I guess.

I think she wants me to share in her romance.

I love her for that.

And I love my mother and father and my grandma.

Ever since I’ve been at Reardan, and seen how great parents do their great parenting, I realize that my folks are pretty good. Sure, my dad has a drinking problem and my mom can be i little eccentric, but they make sacrifices for me. They worry about me. They talk to me. And best of all, they listen to me.

I’ve learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children.

And, trust me, there are plenty of Reardan kids who get ignored by their parents.

There are white parents, especially fathers, who never come to the school. They don’t come for their kids’ games, concerts, plays, or carnivals.

I’m friends with some white kids, and I’ve never met their lathers.

That’s absolutely freaky.

On the rez, you know every kid’s father, mother, grandparents, dog, cat, and shoe size. I mean, yeah, Indians are screwed up, but we’re really close to each other. We KNOW each other.Everybody knows everybody.

But despite the fact that Reardan is a tiny town, people can still be strangers to each other.

I’ve learned that white people, especially fathers, are good at hiding in plain sight.

I mean, yeah, my dad would sometimes go on a drinking binge and be gone for a week, but those white dads can completely disappear without ever leaving the living room. They can just BLEND into their chairs. They become the chairs.

So, okay, I’m not all goofy-eyed in love with white people all right? Plenty of the old white guys still give me the stink eye just for being Indian. And a lot of them think I shouldn’t be in the school at all.

I’m realistic, okay?

I’ve thought about these things. And maybe I haven’t done enough thinking, but I’ve done enough to know that it’s better to live in Reardan than in Wellpinit.

Maybe only slightly better.

But from where I’m standing, slightly better is about the size of the Grand Canyon.

And, hey, do you want to know the very best thing about Reardan?

It’s Penelope, of course. And maybe Gordy.

And do you want to know what the very best thing was about Wellpinit?

My grandmother.

She was amazing.

She was the most amazing person in the world.

Do you want to know the very best thing about my grandmother?

She was tolerant.

And I know that’s a hilarious thing to say about your grandmother.

I mean, when people compliment their grandmothers, especially their Indian grandmothers, they usually say things like, “My grandmother is so wise” and “My grandmother is so kind” and “My grandmother has seen everything.”

And, yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and had traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness.

My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance.

Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.

Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure visions to the lucky ones.

Gay people were seen as magical, too.

I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.

Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!

My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.

“Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?”

Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.

Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.

But not my grandmother.

She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know?

She always approached each new person and each new experience the exact same way.

Whenever we went to Spokane, my grandmother would talk to anybody, even the homeless people, even the homeless guys who were talking to invisible people.

My grandmother would start talking to the invisible people, too.

Why would she do that?”Well,” she said, “how can I be sure there aren’t invisible people in the world? Scientists didn’t believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong, then all of us can be wrong. I mean, what if all of those invisible people ARE scientists?

Think about that one.”

So I thought about that one:

After I decided to go to Reardan, I felt like an invisible mountain gorilla scientist. My grandmother was the only one who thought it was a 100 percent good idea.

“Think of all the new people you’re going to meet,” she said. “That’s the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people. I wish I could go with you. It’s such an exciting idea.”

Of course, my grandmother had met thousands, tens of thousands, of other Indians at powwows all over the country. Every powwow Indian knew her.

Yep, my grandmother was powwow-famous.

Everybody loved her; she loved everybody.

In fact, last week, she was walking back home from a mini powwow at the Spokane Tribal Community Center, when she «is struck and killed by a drunk driver.

Yeah, you read that right.She didn’t die right away. The reservation paramedics kept her alive long enough to get to the hospital in Spokane, lint she died during emergency surgery.

Massive internal injuries.

At the hospital, my mother wept and wailed. She’d lost her mother. When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

My father was all quiet and serious with the surgeon, a big and handsome white guy.

“Did she say anything before she died?” he asked.

“Yes,” the surgeon said. “She said, ‘Forgive him.’ “ “Forgive him?” my father asked.

“I think she was referring to the drunk driver who killed her.”

Wow.

My grandmother’s last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love, and tolerance.

She wanted us to forgive Gerald, the dumb-ass Spokane Indian alcoholic who ran her over and killed her.

I think my dad wanted to go find Gerald and beat him to death.

I think my mother would have helped him.

I think I would have helped him, too.

But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.

Even dead, she was a better person than us.

The tribal cops found Gerald hiding out at Benjamin Lake.

They took him to jail.

And after we got back from the hospital, my father went over to see Gerald to kill him or forgive him.

I think the tribal cops might have looked the other way if my father had decided to strangle Gerald.

But my father, respecting my grandmother’s last wishes, left Gerald alone to the justice system, which ended up sending him to prison for eighteen months. After he got out, Gerald moved to a reservation in California and nobody ever saw him again.But my family had to bury my grandmother.

I mean, it’s natural to bury your grandmother.

Grandparents are supposed to die first, but they’re supposed to die of old age. They’re supposed to die of a heart attack or a stroke or of cancer or of Alzheimer’s.

THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET RUN OVER AND KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER!

I mean, the thing is, plenty of Indians have died because they were drunk. And plenty of drunken Indians have killed other drunken Indians.

But my grandmother had never drunk alcohol in her life. Not one drop. That’s the rarest kind of Indian in the world.

I know only, like, five Indians in our whole tribe who have never drunk alcohol.

And my grandmother was one of them.

“Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,” she used to say.

“Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn’t touch the world with all of my senses intact?”

Well, my grandmother has left this world and she’s now roaming around the afterlife.

Wake

We held Grandmother’s wake three days later. We knew that people would be coming in large numbers. But we were stunned because almost two thousand Indians showed up that day to say good-bye.

And nobody gave me any crap.

I mean, I was still the kid who had betrayed the tribe. And that couldn’t be forgiven. But I was also the kid who’d lost his grandmother. And everybody knew that losing my grandmother was horrible. So they all waved the white flag that day and let me grieve in peace.

And after that, they stopped hassling me whenever they saw me on the rez. I mean, I still lived on the rez, right? And I had to go get the mail and get milk from the trading post and jus I hang out, right? So I was still a part of the rez.

People had either ignored me or called me names or pushed me.

But they stopped after my grandmother died.

I guess they realized that I was in enough pain already. Or maybe they realized they’d been cruel jerks.

I wasn’t suddenly popular, of course. But I wasn’t a villain anymore.

No matter what else happened between my tribe and me, I would always love them for giving me peace on the day of my grandmother’s funeral.

Even Rowdy just stood far away.

He would always be my best friend, no matter how much he hated me.

We had to move the coffin out of the Spokane Tribal Longhouse and set it on the fifty yard line of the football field.

We were lucky the weather was good.

Yep, about two thousand Indians (and a few white folks) sat and stood on the football field as we all said good-bye to the greatest Spokane Indian in history.

I knew that my grandmother would have loved that send-off.

It was crazy and fun and sad.

My sister wasn’t able to come to the funeral. That was the worst part about it. She didn’t have enough money to get back, I guess. That was sad. But she promised me she’d sing one hundred mourning songs that day.

We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye.

Tons of people told stories about my grandmother.

But there was one story that mattered most of all.

About ten hours into the wake, a white guy stood. He was a stranger. He looked vaguely familiar. I knew I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t think of where. We all wondered exactly who he was. But nobody knew. That wasn’t surprising. My grandmother had met thousands of people.

The white guy was holding this big suitcase.He held that thing tight to his chest as he talked.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Ted.”

And then I remembered who he was. He was a rich and famous billionaire white dude.

He was famous for being filthy rich and really weird.

My grandmother knew Billionaire Ted!

Wow.

We all were excited to hear this guy’s story. And so what did he have to say?

We all groaned.

We’d expected this white guy to be original. But he was yet another white guy who showed up on the rez because he loved Indian people SOOOOOOOO much.

Do you know how many white strangers show up on Indian reservations every year and start telling Indians how much they love them?

Thousands.

It’s sickening.

And boring.

“Listen,” Ted said. “I know you’ve heard that before. I know white people say that all the time. But I still need to say it. I love Indians. I love your songs, your dances, and your souls. And I love your art.

I collect Indian art.”

Oh, God, he was a collector. Those guys made Indians feel like insects pinned to a display board. I looked around the football field. Yep, all of my cousins were squirming like beetles and butterflies with pins stuck in their hearts.

“I’ve collected Indian art for decades,” Ted said. “I have old spears. Old arrowheads. I have old armor. I have blankets. And paintings. And sculptures. And baskets. And jewelry.”

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

“And I have old powwow dance outfits,” he said.

Now that made everybody sit up and pay attention.”About ten years ago, this Indian guy knocked on the door of my cabin in Montana.”

Cabin, my butt. Ted lived in a forty-room log mansion just outside of Bozeman.

“Well, I didn’t know this stranger,” Ted said. “But I always open my door to Indians.”

Oh, please.

“And this particular Indian stranger was holding a very beautiful powwow dance outfit, a woman’s powwow dance outfit. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was all beaded blue and red and yellow with a thunderbird design. It must have weighed fifty pounds. And I couldn’t imagine the strength of the woman who could dance beneath that magical burden.”

Every woman in the world could dance that way.

“Well, this Indian stranger said he was in a desperate situation. His wife was dying of cancer and he needed money to pay for her medicine. I knew he was lying. I knew he’d stolen the outfit. I could always smell a thief.”

Smell yourself, Ted.

“And I knew I should call the police on this thief. I knew I should take that outfit away and find the real owner. But it was so beautiful, so perfect, that I gave the Indian stranger a thou sand dollars and sent him on his way. And I kept the outfit.”

Whoa, was Ted coming here to make a confession? And why had he chosen my grandmother’s funeral for his confession?

“For years, I felt terrible. I’d look at that outfit hanging on the wall of my Montana cabin.”

Mansion, Ted, it’s a mansion. Go ahead; you can say it: MANSION!

“And then I decided to do some research. I hired an anthropologist, an expert, and he quickly pointed out that the outfit was obviously of Interior Salish origin. And after doing a little research, he discovered that the outfit was Spokane Indian, to be specific. And then, a few years ago, he visited your reservation undercover and learned that this stolen outfit once belonged to a woman named Grandmother Spirit.”

We all gasped. This was a huge shock. I wondered if we were all part of some crazy reality show called When Billionaires Pretend to be Human. I looked around for the cameras.

“Well, ever since I learned who really owned this outfit, I’ve been torn. I always wanted to give it back. But I wanted to keep it, too. I couldn’t sleep some nights because I was so torn up by it.”

Yep, even billionaires have DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL.”And, well, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I packed up the outfit and headed for your reservation, here, to hand-deliver the outfit back to Grandmother Spirit. And I get here only to discover that she’s passed on to the next world. It’s just devastating.”

We were all completely silent. This was the weirdest thing any of us had ever witnessed.

And we’re Indians, so trust me, we’ve seen some really weird stuff.

“But I have the outfit here,” Ted said. He opened up his suitcase and pulled out the outfit and held it up. It was fifty pounds, so he struggled with it. Anybody would have struggled with it.

“So if any of Grandmother Spirit’s children are here, I’d love to return her outfit to them.”

My mother stood and walked up to Ted.

“I’m Grandmother Spirit’s only daughter,” she said.

My mother’s voice had gotten all formal. Indians are good at that. We’ll be talking and laughing and carrying on like normal, and then, BOOM, we get all serious and sacred and start talking like some English royalty.

“Dearest daughter,” Ted said. “I hereby return your stolen goods. I hope you forgive me for returning it too late.”

“Well, there’s nothing to forgive, Ted,” my mother said. “Grandmother Spirit wasn’t a powwow dancer.”

Ted’s mouth dropped open.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“My mother loved going to powwows. But she never danced. She never owned a dance outfit. This couldn’t be hers.”

Ted didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything.

“In fact, looking at the beads and design, this doesn’t look Spokane at all. I don’t recognize the work.

Does anybody here recognize the beadwork?”

“No,” everybody said.

“It looks more Sioux to me,” my mother said. “Maybe Oglala. Maybe. I’m not an expert.

Your anthropologist wasn’t much of an expert, either. He got this way wrong.”

We all just sat there in silence as Ted mulled that over.Then he packed his outfit back into the suitcase, hurried over to his waiting car, and sped away.

For about two minutes, we all sat quiet. Who knew what to say? And then my mother started laughing.

And that set us all off.

Two thousands Indians laughed at the same time.

We kept laughing.

It was the most glorious noise I’d ever heard.

And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean, but, dang, we knew how to laugh.

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said good-bye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them.

Each funeral was a funeral for all of us.We lived and died together.

All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground.

And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt.

And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses.

Valentine Heart

A few days after I gave Penelope a homemade Valentine (and she said she forgot it was Valentine’s Day), my dad’s best friend, Eugene, was shot in the face in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven in Spokane.

Way drunk, Eugene was shot and killed by one of his good friends, Bobby, who was too drunk to even remember pulling the trigger.

The police think Eugene and Bobby fought over the last drink in a bottle of wine:

When Bobby was sober enough to realize what he’d done, he could only call Eugene’s name over and over, as if that would somehow bring him back.

A few weeks later, in jail, Bobby hung himself with a bed-sheet.

We didn’t even have enough time to forgive him.

He punished himself for his sins.My father went on a legendary drinking binge.

My mother went to church every single day.

It was all booze and God, booze and God, booze and God.

We’d lost my grandmother and Eugene. How much loss were we supposed to endure?

I felt helpless and stupid.

I needed books.

I wanted books.

And I drew and drew and drew cartoons.

I was mad at God; I was mad at Jesus. They were mocking me, so I mocked them: I hoped I could find more cartoons that would help me. And I hoped I could find stories that would help me.

So I looked up the word “grief” in the dictionary.

I wanted to find out everything I could about grid I wanted to know why my family had been given so much I grieve about.

And then I discovered the answer:

Okay, so it was Gordy who showed me a book written by the guy who knew the answer.

It was Euripides, this Greek writer from the fifth century BC.

A way-old dude.

In one of his plays, Medea says, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?”

I read that and thought, “Well, of course, man. We Indians have LOST EVERYTHING.

We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other.

We only know how to lose and be lost.”

But it’s more than that, too.

I mean, the thing is, Medea was so distraught by the world, arid felt so betrayed, that she murdered her own kids.

She thought the world was that joyless.

And, after Eugene’s funeral, I agreed with her. I could have easily killed myself, killed my mother and father, killed the birds, killed the trees, and killed the oxygen in the air.

More than anything, I wanted to kill God.

I was joyless.I mean, I can’t even tell you how I found the strength to get up every morning. And yet, every morning, I did get up and go to school.

Well, no, that’s not exactly true.

I was so depressed that I thought about dropping out of Reardan.

I thought about going back to Wellpinit.

I blamed myself for all of the deaths.

I had cursed my family. I had left the tribe, and had broken something inside all of us, and I was now being punished for that.

No, my family was being punished.

I was healthy and alive.

Then, after my fifteenth or twentieth missed day of school, I sat in my social studies classroom with Mrs. Jeremy.

Mrs. Jeremy was an old bird who’d taught at Reardan for thirty-five years.I slumped into her class and sat in the back of the room.

“Oh, class,” she said. “We have a special guest today. It’s Arnold Spirit. I didn’t realize you still went to this school, Mr. Spirit.”

The classroom was quiet. They all knew my family had been living inside a grief-storm.

And had this teacher just mocked me for that?

“What did you just say?” I asked her.

“You really shouldn’t be missing class this much,” she said.

If I’d been stronger, I would have stood up to her. I would have called her names. I would have walked across the room and slapped her.

But I was too broken.

Instead, it was Gordy who defended me.

He stood with his textbook and dropped it.

Whomp!

He looked so strong. He looked like a warrior. He was protecting me like Rowdy used to protect me. Of course, Rowdy would have thrown the book at the teacher and then punched her.

Gordy showed a lot of courage in standing up to a teacher like that. And his courage inspired the others.

Penelope stood and dropped her textbook.

And then Roger stood and dropped his textbook.

Whomp!

Then the other basketball players did the same.

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

And Mrs. Jeremy flinched each and every time, as if she’d been kicked in the crotch.

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

Then all of my classmates walked out of the room.A spontaneous demonstration.

Of course, I probably should have walked out with them. It would have been more poetic.

It would have made more sense. Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn’t have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST!

And that thought just cracked me up.

It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad.

But it was sure funny.

“What are you laughing at?” Mrs. Jeremy asked me.

“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.”