That night belongs to just me and my coach.
And a Partridge in a Pear Tree
When the holidays rolled around, we didn't have any money for presents, so Dad did
what he always does when we don't have enough money.
He took what little money we did have and ran away to get drunk.
He left on Christmas Eve and came back on January 2.
With an epic hangover, he just lay on his bed for hours.
"Hey, Dad," I said.
"Hey, kid," he said. "I'm sorry about Christmas."
"It's okay," I said.
But it wasn't okay. It was about as far from okay as you can get. If okay was the earth, then I was standing on Jupiter. I don't know why I said it was okay. For some reason, I was proting the feelings of the man who had broken my heart yet again.
Jeez, I'd just won the Silver Medal in the Children of Alcoholic Olympics.
"I got you something," he said.
"What?"
"It's in my boot."
I picked up one of his cowboy boots.
"No, the other one," he said. "Inside, under that foot-pad thing."
I picked up the other boot and dug inside. Man, that thing smelled like booze and fear and failure.
I found a wrinkled and damp five dollar bill.
"Merry Christmas," he said.
Wow.
Drunk for a week, my father must have really wanted to spend those last five dollars.
Shoot, you can buy a bottle of the worst whiskey for five dollars. He could have spent that five bucks and stayed drunk for another day or two. But he saved it for me.
It was a beautiful and ugly thing.
"Thanks, Dad," I said.
He was asleep.
"Merry Christmas," I said, and kissed him on the cheek.
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 cou
ntry. 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 se
en. 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.