Ten Little Indians: Stories

  She wept. He sat on the floor beside her and held her head in his lap. He stroked her hair until she calmed down.

  “We’re going to go now,” he said. “I’m going to take you to the hospital, okay?”

  “Wait, wait,” she said. “There’s more.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear these things. I don’t want to think about them. I don’t want to remember them.”

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please listen to me.”

  She was desperate. She needed him. He wanted to be needed. He nodded.

  “The thing is,” she said, “the biggest thing is, ever since the Trade Center fell down, I’ve been hoping it would happen to me. I kept hoping I’d be at work or in some shopping mall or theater when it blew up. So when that bomber ran inside the restaurant and shouted at us, I was happy. I knew God had answered my prayers. I knew I was going to survive. I was going to live, and I was going to crawl out of the ruins, and I was going to walk away from my life. I knew they’d never find me and would figure I was dead. They’d mark me down as dead, but I’d be alive. I’d be so alive, and I’d walk away. I’d walk away and start a new life, a better life. I was going to escape.”

  How could anyone be so unhappy? How could anybody survive so much pain and loneliness? But these questions were inadequate, he knew, and he was inadequate. She needed him to be a good man, and he had never been that, not once in his life. He pushed her away and ran for the bathroom. But he was not fast enough and vomited on the living room carpet.

  “It’s awful,” he said. “It’s so awful.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I am, I am.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Take me to the hospital. Make sure I’m safe, and you never have to see me again. Promise you’ll take me to the hospital. Promise me I’ll be safe.”

  Stronger than he knew, he picked her up like a child and carried her out the door and down three flights of stairs. Curled in his arms, she cried and prayed. Through the crowded and hectic streets, he carried her. All around them, men and women and children stared up into the skies and waited for death to swoop down and claim them. He looked at those strangers and knew each of them lived with terrible secrets. He knew that man cheated on his wife with her sister and that woman pinched her Alzheimered mother’s arms until they bled. And that teenage boy set dogs on fire and that pretty teenage girl once knocked down a fat ugly girl and spit in her mouth. And he knew that father had two sons, one who couldn’t read and one who wore dresses, and he made them punch each other because they were stupid and weak. And there was a white grandmother who hated her Mexican grandchildren and a priest who burned himself with cigarettes whenever he dreamed about sex with little boys. And that man had abandoned his wife and children and didn’t know they were now living in a car, and that woman hadn’t talked to her father in fifteen years and didn’t know he was now dying of prostate cancer. And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we’re all failures. Carrying the woman, he walked among these sinners, the obese and the vain, the intolerant and the selfish, the liars and thieves, the wasteful and the avaricious. And wasn’t he the greatest sinner? Wasn’t he more dangerous to the people who loved him than any terrorist could ever be? Wasn’t he the man who failed the woman who’d loved him most? Didn’t he explode her life and burn her to the ground? Right now, somewhere in the world, wasn’t she still grieving the death of their marriage and the death of some large part of her? Forgive me, God, oh, forgive me, he thought as he carried this other exploded woman. If he could save her, he hoped he might be saved. But she wanted to escape. She pushed and pulled against his grip and he set her down. Everything smelled of smoke and fire. She kissed him hard and touched his face. He wanted to talk, to say the words that would free her. But he was silent and she was silent. And wasn’t silence more ambiguous and terrifying than anything else? Loose-limbed, he trembled. He wanted to love her, and he wanted his love to be bittersweet and irrepressible. He wanted his love to be different than everybody else’s. He wanted his love to be the only true image of God. He wanted his love to be the tyrant that saved the world no matter if the world desired to be saved. He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved? She looked back once, and he thought to chase after her, but she shook her head, and again walked away from him. And he watched her until he couldn’t see her anymore.

  Do Not Go Gentle

  MY WIFE AND I didn’t know Mr. Grief in person until our baby boy got his face stuck between his mattress and crib and suffocated himself blue. He died three times that day, Mr. Grief squeezing his lungs tight, but the muscular doctors and nurses battled that suffocating monster man and brought our boy back to life three times. He was our little blue baby Jesus.

  I’m lying. Our baby wasn’t Jesus. Our baby was alive only a little bit. Mostly he was dead and slept his way through a coma. In Children’s Hospital, our baby was hooked up to a million dollars’ worth of machines that breathed, pissed, and pooped for him. I bet you could line up all of my wife’s and my grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and first, second, and third cousins, and rob their wallets and purses, and maybe you’d collect about $512.

  Mr. Grief was a billionaire. He could afford to check on our baby every six hours, but every six hours, my wife and I cussed him out and sent him running. My wife is beautiful and powerful and only twenty-five years old, but she is magic like a grandmother, and Indian grandmothers aren’t afraid of a little man like Mr. Grief.

  One night, while I guarded over our baby, my wife wrapped her braids in a purple bandana, shoved her hands into thick work clothes, sneaked up on Mr. Grief in the hallway, and beat him severely about the head and shoulders like she was Muhammad Ali.

  When you’re hurting, it feels good to hurt somebody else. But you have to be careful. If you get addicted to the pain-causing, then you start hurting people who don’t need hurting. If you turn into a pain-delivering robot, then you start thinking everybody looks like Mr. Grief and everybody deserves a beating.

  One day when my wife was crying, I swear I saw Mr. Grief hiding behind her eyes. So I yelled and screamed at her and called her all of the bad names. But I got really close to her to yell, because it’s more effective to yell when you’re closer to your enemy, and I smelled her true scent. I knew it was only my wife inside my wife, because she smelled like tenderness, and Mr. Grief smells like a porcupine rotting dead on the side of the road.

  My wife and I didn’t even name our baby. We were Indians and didn’t want to carry around too much hope. Hope eats your flesh like a spider bite. But my wife and I loved our little Baby X and took turns sitting beside his bed and singing to him. The nurses and doctors let us bring in our hand drums, so we sang powwow songs to our baby. I’m a pretty good singer, and my wife is the best there is, and crowds always gathered to listen to us, and that made us feel good.

  It was great to feel good about something, because my wife and I were all the way grieving. We took turns singing honor songs and falling asleep. Mr. Grief is a wizard who puts sleep spells on you. My wife spent more time sleeping than I did. I figure she was sadder because she had carried our baby inside her womb and had memorized the way he moved.

  One day about a week after our baby fell into his coma, it was me who fell into a waking sleep in a hospital bathroom. Sitting on the bowl, pants wrapped around my ankles, I couldn’t move. I was awake and paralyzed by the deadly venom of the grief snake. I wondered if I was going to die right there in that terrible and shameful and hilarious way. I don’t want to die like Elvis, I kept saying to myself like it was a prayer.

  But right then, when I was ready to roll
onto the floor and crawl my way to safety like a grief soldier under grief fire, I heard two other sad men come walking into the bathroom. Those men didn’t know I was trapped on the toilet, so they spoke freely and honestly about some sad woman.

  “Did you see that woman?” asked man #1.

  “You mean the fat one in sweatpants?” asked man #2.

  “Yeah, can you believe how terrible she looked? I know our kids are sick, but that doesn’t mean we have to let ourselves go like that.”

  “If you let yourself get ugly on the outside, you’re gonna feel even worse on the inside.”

  “Yeah, what are your kids gonna think when they see you looking so bad?”

  “They’re gonna be sad.”

  “And things are sad enough without having to look at your fat mom wearing ugly sweatpants.”

  “The worst part is, that woman’s kid, he isn’t even that sick. He isn’t terminal. He’s only on the third floor.”

  “Yeah, put her kid on the fourth floor with our kids, and let’s see how ugly she gets then.”

  Listening to their awfulness, I found the strength to stand and walk out of the stall. They were shocked to see me, and they went all quiet and silent and still and frozen. They were ashamed of themselves, I guess, for building a secret clubhouse out of the two-by-four boards and ten-penny nails of their pain. I could be deadly serious and deadly funny at the same time, so I washed my hands really slow, making sure each finger was cleaner than the finger before. I dried them even slower, using one towel for each hand. And then I looked at those two men. I studied the angles and shapes of them like I was taking a geometry test.

  I almost yelled at them. I wanted to scream at them for being as shallow and dirty as a dog dish. But hell, their kids were dying. What else were they going to do but punish the world for it? A father with a sick child is an angry god. I know I would have earthquaked Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome, and killed a million innocent people, if it guaranteed my baby boy would rise back to his full life.

  But that whole bathroom crazy-scene gave me some energy. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. I felt like a good woman and I wanted to be a good mother-man. So I left the hospital and went out shopping for baby toys. The hospital was on Fifteenth and John, and over the past few days, on my journey between home and hospital, I’d been driving past a toy store over on Pike and Seventh. It was called Toys in Babeland, and that was a cute name, so I figured I’d buy some stuffed teddy bears and a rattle and maybe some of those black-and-white toys the experts say are good for babies’ eyes. Those seemed like good toy ideas, but I wasn’t sure. What kind of toys do you buy, exactly, for a coma baby? I walked over to the store and strolled in, feeling religious about my mission, and shocked myself to discover Toys in Babeland was a sex-toy store.

  “Honey,” I said to my wife later, “those women were selling vibrators and dildos and edible underwear and butt plugs and lubricants and some stuff I had no idea what the hell you were supposed to do with it. Sweetheart,” I said to her, “some of those sex toys looked like a genius and a crazy scientist made them.” Now, I was surely embarrassed, but I’m not a prude, so I browsed around, not expecting to buy anything but not wanting to run out of the store like a frightened Christian. Then I turned the corner and saw it, the vibrator they call Chocolate Thunder.

  “Darling,” I said to my wife later, “I heard that big old music from that 2001: Space Odyssey movie when I saw that miracle vibrator.”

  Chocolate Thunder was dark brown and fifteen inches long and needed a nine-volt battery. I like to think my indigenous penis is powerful. But it would take a whole war party of Indian men to equal up to one Chocolate Thunder. I was shy but quick to buy the thing and ran back to the hospital with it. I ran into the fourth-floor ICU, pulled Chocolate Thunder out of its box, held it up in the air like a magic wand, and switched it on.

  Of course, all the doctors and nurses and mothers and fathers were half stunned by that vibrator. And it was a strange and difficult thing. It was sex that made our dying babies, and here was a huge old piece of buzzing sex I was trying to cast spells with. I waved it over our baby and ran around the room waving it over the other sick babies. I was laughing and hooting, and other folks were laughing and hooting, and a few others didn’t know what the hell to do. But pretty soon everybody was taking their turn casting spells with Chocolate Thunder. Maybe it was blasphemous, and maybe it was stupid and useless, but we all were sick and tired of waiting for our babies to die. We wanted our babies to live, and we were ready to try anything to help them live. Maybe some people can get by with quiet prayers, but I wanted to shout and scream and vibrate. So did plenty of other fathers and mothers in that sickroom.

  It was my wife who grabbed Chocolate Thunder and used it like a drumstick to pound her hand drum. She sang a brand-new song that echoed up and down the hallways of Children’s Hospital. Every sick and dying and alive and dead kid heard it, and they were happy and good in their hearts. My wife sang the most beautiful song anybody ever heard in that place. She sang like ten thousand Indian grandmothers rolled into one mother. All the while, Chocolate Thunder sang with her and turned the whole thing into a healing duet.

  We humans are too simpleminded. We all like to think each person, place, or thing is only itself. A vibrator is a vibrator is a vibrator, right? But that’s not true at all. Everything is stuffed to the brim with ideas and love and hope and magic and dreams. I brought Chocolate Thunder back to the hospital, but it was my magical and faithful wife who truly believed it was going to bring our baby back to us. She wanted it to bring every baby back to life. Over the next week, my wife sat beside our baby’s bed and held that vibrator in her two hands and sang and prayed along with its buzzing. She used up the energy of two batteries, and maybe our baby would have woken up anyway, and a few other babies never did wake up at all, but my wife still believes our son heard the magic call of Chocolate Thunder and couldn’t resist it. Our beautiful, beautiful boy opened his eyes and smiled, even if he was too young to smile, but I think sick kids get old and wise and funny very fast.

  And so my wife and I named him Abraham and carried him home and lay him in his crib and hung Chocolate Thunder from the ceiling above him like a crazy mobile and laughed and laughed with the joy of it. We deported Mr. Grief back to his awful country. Our baby boy was going to live a long and good life. We wondered aloud what we would tell our Abraham about the wondrous world when he was old enough to wonder about it.

  Flight Patterns

  AT 5:05 A.M., PATSY Cline fell loudly to pieces on William’s clock radio. He hit the snooze button, silencing lonesome Patsy, and dozed for fifteen more minutes before Donna Fargo bragged about being the happiest girl in the whole USA. William wondered what had ever happened to Donna Fargo, whose birth name was the infinitely more interesting Yvonne Vaughn, and wondered why he knew Donna Fargo’s birth name. Ah, he was the bemused and slightly embarrassed owner of a twenty-first-century American mind. His intellect was a big comfy couch stuffed with sacred and profane trivia. He knew the names of all nine of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands and could quote from memory the entire Declaration of Independence. William knew Donna Fargo’s birth name because he wanted to know her birth name. He wanted to know all of the great big and tiny little American details. He didn’t want to choose between Ernie Hemingway and the Spokane tribal elders, between Mia Hamm and Crazy Horse, between The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Chief Dan George. William wanted all of it. Hunger was his crime. As for dear Miss Fargo, William figured she probably played the Indian casino circuit along with the Righteous Brothers, Smokey Robinson, Eddie Money, Pat Benatar, RATT, REO Speedwagon, and dozens of other formerly famous rock- and country-music stars. Many of the Indian casino acts were bad, and most of the rest were pure nostalgic entertainment, but a small number made beautiful and timeless music. William knew the genius Merle Haggard played thirty or forty Indian casinos every year, so long live Haggard and long live tribal economic sovereignty. Who c
ares about fishing and hunting rights? Who cares about uranium mines and nuclear-waste-dump sites on sacred land? Who cares about the recovery of tribal languages? Give me Freddy Fender singing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” in English and Spanish to 206 Spokane Indians, William thought, and I will be a happy man.

  But William wasn’t happy this morning. He’d slept poorly—he always slept poorly—and wondered again if his insomnia was a physical or a mental condition. His doctor had offered him sleeping-pill prescriptions, but William declined for philosophical reasons. He was an Indian who didn’t smoke or drink or eat processed sugar. He lifted weights three days a week, ran every day, and competed in four triathlons a year. A two-mile swim, a 150-mile bike ride, and a full marathon. A triathlon was a religious quest. If Saint Francis were still around, he’d be a triathlete. Another exaggeration! Theological hyperbole! Rabid self-justification! Diagnostically speaking, William was an obsessive-compulsive workaholic who was afraid of pills. So he suffered sleepless nights and constant daytime fatigue.