"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."
I walked out of the classroom and felt like dancing and singing.
It all gave me hope. It gave me a little bit of joy.
And I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That's the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change. I made a list of the people who had given me the most joy in my life:
1. Rowdy
2. My mother
3. My father
4. My grandmother
5. Eugene
6. Coach
7. Roger
8. Gordy
9. Penelope, even if she only partially loves me
I made a list of the musicians who had played the most joyous music:
1. Patsy Cline, my mother's favorite
2. Hank Williams, my father's favorite
3. Jimi Hendrix, my grandmother's favorite
4. Guns N' Roses, my big sister's favorite
5. White Stripes, my favorite
I made a list of my favorite foods:
1. pizza
2. chocolate pudding
3. peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
4. banana cream pie
5. fried chicken
6. mac & cheese
7. hamburgers
8. french fries
9. grapes
I made a list of my favorite books:
1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. Catcher in the Rye
3. Fat Kid Rules the World
4. Tangerine
5. Feed
6. Catalyst
7. Invisible Man
8. Fools Crow
9. Jar of Fools
I made a list of my favorite basketball players:
1. Dwayne Wade
2. Shane Battier
3. Steve Nash
4. Ray Allen
5. Adam Morrison
6. Julius Erving
7. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
8. George Gervin
9. Mugsy Bogues
I kept making list after list of the things that made me feel joy. And I kept drawing
cartoons of the things that made me angry. I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony.
In Like a Lion
I'd never guessed I'd be a good basketball player.
I mean, I'd always loved ball, mostly because my father loved it so much, and because
Rowdy loved it even more, but I figured I'd always be one of those players who sat on the bench and cheered his bigger, faster, more talented teammates to victory and/or defeat.
But somehow or another, as the season went on, I became a freshman starter on a varsity basketball team. And, sure, all of my teammates were bigger and faster, but none of them could shoot like me.
I was the hired gunfighter.
Back on the rez, I was a decent player, I guess. A rebounder and a guy who could run up and down the floor without tripping. But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan.
Overnight, I became a good player.
I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest
Indian on the reservation totem pole—I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They
expected me to be good. And so I became good.
I wanted to live up to expectations.
I guess that's what it comes down to.
The power of expectations.
And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew
until I was scoring twelve points a game.
AS A FRESHMAN!
Coach was thinking I would be an all-state player in a few years. He was thinking maybe I'd play some small-college ball.
It was crazy.
How often does a reservation Indian kid hear that?
How often do you hear the words "Indian" and "college" in the same sentence?
Especially in my family. Especially in my tribe.
But don't think I'm getting stuck up or anything.
It's still absolutely scary to play ball, to compete, to try to win.
I throw up before every game.
Coach said he used to throw up before games.
"Kid," he said, "some people need to clear the pipes before they can play. I used to be a yucker. You're a yucker. Ain't nothing wrong with being a yucker."
So I asked Dad if he used to be a yucker.
"What's a yucker?" he asked.
"Somebody who throws up before basketball games," said.
"Why would you throw up?"
"Because I'm nervous."
"You mean, because you're scared?"
"Nervous, scared, same kind of things, aren't they?"
"Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play."
All right, so Dad made it clear.
I was a nervous yucker in Reardan. Back in Wellpinit, I was a scared yucker.
Nobody else on my team was a yucker. Didn't matter one way or the other, I guess. We
were just a good team, period.
After losing our first game to Wellpinit, we won twelve in a row. We just killed people, winning by double figures every time. We beat our archrivals, Davenport, by thirty-three.
Townspeople were starting to compare us to the great Reardan teams of the past. People
were starting to compare some of our players to great players of the past.
Roger, our big man, was the new Joel Wetzel.
Jeff, our point guard, was the new Little Larry Soliday.
James, our small forward, was the new Keith Schulz.
But nobody talked about me that way. I guess it was hard to compare me to players from
the past. I wasn't from the town, not originally, so I would always be an outsider.
And no matter how good I was, I would always be an Indian. And some folks just found
it difficult to compare an Indian to a white guy. It wasn't racism, not exactly. It was, well, I don't know what it was.
I was something different, something new. I just hope that, twenty years in the future, they'd be comparing some kid to me:
"Yeah, you see that kid shoot, he reminds me so much of Arnold Spirit."
Maybe that will happen. I don't know. Can an Indian have a legacy in a white town? And
should a teenager be worry about his fricking legacy anyway?
Jeez, I must be an egomaniac.
Well, anyway, our record was 12 wins and 1 loss when we had our rematch with
Wellpinit.
They came to our gym, so I wasn't going to get burned the stake. In fact, my white fans were going to cheer for like I was some kind of crusading warrior:
Jeez, I felt like one of those Indian scouts who led the U.S. Cavalry against other Indians.
But that was okay, I guess. I wanted to win. I wanted revenge. I wasn't playing for the fans. I wasn't playing for the white people. I was playing to beat Rowdy.
Yep, I wanted to embarrass my best friend.
He'd turned into a stud on his team. He was only a freshman, too, but he was averaging
twenty-five points a game. I followed his progress in the sports section.
He'd led the Wellpinit Redskins to a 13-0 record. They were the number one-ranked
small school in the state. Wellpinit had never been ranked that high. And it was all because of Rowdy. We were ranked number two, so our game was a big deal. Especially for a s
mall-school battle.
And most especially because I was a Spokane Indian playing against his old friends (and enemies).
A local news crew came out to interview me before the game.
"So, Arnold, how does it feel to play against your former teammates?" the sports guy asked me.
"It's kind of weird," I said.
"How weird?"
"Really weird."
Yep, I was scintillating.
The sports guy stopped the interview.
"Listen," he said. "I know this is a difficult thing. You're young. But maybe you could get more specific about your feelings."
"My feelings?" I asked.
"Yeah, this is a major deal in your life, isn't it?"
Well, duh, yeah, of course it was a major deal. It was maybe the biggest thing in my life ever, but I wasn't about to share my feelings with the whole world. I wasn't going to start blubbering for the local sports guy like he was my priest or something.
I had some pride, you know?
I believed in my privacy.
It wasn't like I'd called the guy and offered up my story you know?
And I was kind of suspicious that white people were really interested in seeing some
Indians battle each other. I think it was sort of like watching dogfighting, you know?
It made me feel exposed and primitive.
"So, okay," the sports guy said. "Are you ready to try again?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, let's roll."
The camera guy started filming.
"So, Arnold," the sports guy said. "Back in December, you faced your old classmates, and fellow Spokane tribal members, in a basketball game back on the reservation, and yon lost.
They're now the number one-ranked team in the state and they're coming to your home gym.
How does that make you feel?"
"Weird," I said.
"Cut, cut, cut, cut," the sports guy said. He was mad now.
"Arnold," he said. "Could you maybe think of a word besides weird?"
I thought for a bit.
"Hey," I said. "How about I say that it makes me feel like I've had to grow up really fast, too fast, and that I've come to realize that every single moment of my life is important. And that every choice I make is important. And that a basketball game, even a game between two small schools in the middle of nowhere, can be the difference between being happy and being
miserable for the rest of my life."
"Wow," the sports guy said. "That's perfect. That's poetry. Let's go with that, okay?"