Ten Little Indians: Stories

  “Ma!” I shouted after the women had pulled up their pants and fled into the kitchen. “I’m not supposed to see things like that! Well, maybe I’m supposed to see things like that, but only one at a time!”

  “The vagina is a beautiful flower,” said my mother.

  “I know it’s a beautiful flower,” I said. “I’m drowning in the garden!”

  All of those flowery women now sit on the Seattle city council, anchor the local news, sell mattresses, sing in pubs, manage the money of rich men, and design computer programs. They all wanted to become better women, and they have indeed become better at what they do; I have no idea whether they’re happy. I wouldn’t know how to ask that question, and I doubt they’d know how to answer it. I don’t know if I’m happy; I know only that I’m going to work tomorrow, come home and spend the evening with my wife and daughters, and sleep well for approximately eight hours before I do it all over again. It seems to be a good enough life. But could it be better? Am I the best man I can possibly be (a slightly depressing thought, considering the extensive list of my flaws), or have I simply settled into a routine, a comfortable and lifelong ceremony that allows me to live a full life but not an expansive one?

  Near the end of the summer of 1976, a few days before I went back to school, my mother decided to spend one last day with me.

  “Special you-and-me time,” she said. “Before my best friend leaves me for the young women of Garfield High School.”

  We woke early, ate banana and pecan pancakes at a dive on the waterfront, and shopped for new school clothes. I wanted tight jeans and T-shirts with TV stars printed on them; she bought me cords and white dress shirts.

  “I’m going to get beat up,” I said.

  “And all those boys who beat you up,” she said, “will be working for you when you grow up.”

  She was wrong, of course; those tough boys run the trade unions and own the golf courses.

  After shopping, we ate greasy hamburgers and french fries for lunch, told each other dirty jokes, and looked for the car. My mother and I have always been cursed with poor short-term memories, so we never remember where we park the car. I’ve been forced to ride the bus home from teaching because I can’t remember on which street I parked my car. I’m ashamed of my poor memory, but my mother was always amused by her eccentricities.

  “I’m a kook, huh?” she said over and over while we searched for the car.

  “Yes, you’re a kook, and I’m a kook,” I said.

  “We’re a kooky couple,” she said. “We could start a cuckoo-clock company because we’re such a completely kooky couple.”

  Oh, sometimes I felt like her son, and other times I felt like her boyfriend, and most times I felt like her willing audience, laughing when she wanted me to laugh.

  A few minutes after five, right when the city was its busiest with rush-hour traffic and people, when so many commuters were so happy to be done with work, we found our car hidden between two delivery trucks. We’d walked past it ten or twelve times before finally spotting it. Even then, the car was wedged in too tightly to open the doors, so my mother had to climb through the open sunroof, then back the car out so I could get in.

  “It’s a good thing your mother is a world-class gymnast,” she said.

  “Mothers aren’t supposed to climb through sunroofs,” I said.

  “Sexist fantasy,” she said and laughed and laughed.

  The streets were packed with people. Five thousand, ten thousand people, more. Downtown Seattle was alive with color and noise. My mother drove the streets like she was the grand marshal of a parade. She waved and smiled. At stoplights, she poked her head out of the sunroof and praised the blue skies and the golden sun. She sang along with the radio and warbled so loudly and badly that pedestrians heard her and laughed or sang along with her for a few bars. My mother’s joy was infectious. She smiled and caused others to smile. Strangers smiling at strangers! It was no longer a city but a tribe!

  And then I saw a woman cross against the light on Pike and Seventh. She wore a white dress.

  She was beautiful and strong, with long blond hair hanging down past muscled and taut shoulders. A runner, maybe, a marathoner, a lovely kickboxer, I thought. She was a reader, too, swinging a book bag stuffed with paperbacks. I couldn’t see the titles, but I hoped she read an equal mixture of formal poetry and comic books. She was tall, almost six feet, I guessed, but was unashamed of her stature and walked with a graceful and perfect posture. She wore heels! I am tall with a decent and easy happiness, she seemed to say with her step, and I am getting taller and happier! Best of all, she wore that luminous white dress, lacy and conservative for the times, with the hem falling a few inches below her knees. I was in love, in love, in love, and then I saw the menstrual blood that stained the back of her dress, a line of dried blood that ran from her upper thigh down to the hem of the dress.

  “Mom,” I said, but she’d already seen the blood, and we both saw the hundreds of people walking with and against this woman, and how many other hundreds of people had already walked with and against this woman and her blood?

  “Mom,” I said, already crying, wanting to save this woman but unable to think how.

  “I know, I know,” my mother said, but she was frozen. She slowed the car and drove close to the sidewalk, keeping pace with the woman, but that’s all she could do.

  “Mom!”

  “I know, I know!”

  Of course other people noticed the blood. Some of the men and boys laughed and pointed. Some of the women gasped in horror and embarrassment and ran for shelter. Most people remained silent and kept walking, more interested in their own lives than in helping this woman with menstrual blood running down the back of her dress.

  Oh God, I wondered if she was still bleeding and had left a trail of fresh blood behind her. Would she arrive at work in the morning and find the janitors scrubbing clean the carpet of her office? Would she have nightmares about birds swooping down to sip her blood from the sidewalk? Would she dream about hungry rats? And how long had she been bleeding? Did she start bleeding and staining her dress on her way to work? Had she been bleeding and staining her dress all day? Had she gone to lunch with her lover and stained the restaurant chair? Had she left evidence all over the city? How could she trust her friends and coworkers ever again? How could she walk through a city with so much blood staining her white dress and not be stopped by another human being? Would she lose her faith in people, in God, in goodness?

  “Mom!” I cried and cried. “Mom! Mom!”

  “I know! I know!” my mother screamed at me. She stopped the car but still could not find strength enough to open the door, run for the woman, and save her dignity.

  “Mom!”

  “I know!”

  At that moment, an older woman ran a red light, steered her car across three lanes of traffic, and braked to a stop halfway onto the sidewalk. She exploded out of her car with a coat in her hands, wrapped it around the waist of the woman in the white dress, and rushed back to her car. The older woman ran another red light and drove away from the scene.

  “Mom!” I shouted. I grabbed her arm, leaving a bruise that took two weeks to heal, and pulled her toward me. “Do something!” I shouted at her.

  “I know!” my mother screamed and slapped me. “I know!” she screamed and slapped me once more and cut my face with her ring. She slapped me a third time, cutting me again, and she hugged me close and wept. I wept with her. We wept together while the city moved all around us, while one woman led another woman to safety.

  My mother and I have loved and failed each other, and we keep on loving and failing each other, and one of us will eventually bury the other, and the survivor will burn down the church with grief’s hungry fire.

  Do You Know Where I Am?

  SHARON AND I WERE college sweethearts at St. Jerome the Second University in Seattle, or, as it is affectionately known, St. Junior’s. We met at the first mixer dance of our freshman year and so
on discovered we were the only confirmed Native American Roman Catholics within a three-mile radius of campus, so we slept together that inaugural night, in open defiance of Pope Whomever, and kept sleeping together for the next three years. It was primary love: red girl and red boy on white sheets.

  Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.

  My white mother, Mary, bless her soul, raised me all by herself in Seattle because my Indian daddy, Marvin, died of stomach cancer when I was a baby. I never knew him, but I spent half of every summer on the Spokane Reservation with his mother and father, my grandparents. My mother wanted me to keep in touch with my tribal heritage, but mostly, I read spy novels to my grandfather and shopped garage sales and secondhand stores with my grandmother. I suppose, for many Indians, garage sales and trashy novels are highly traditional and sacred. We all make up our ceremonies as we go along, right? I thought the reservation was ordinary and magical, like a sedate version of Disneyland. All told, I loved to visit but loved my home much more. In Seattle, my mother was a corporate lawyer for old-money companies and sent me to Lakeside Upper School, where I was a schoolmate of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who have become the new-money kings of the world.

  Sharon went to St. Therese’s School for Girls. Her parents, Wilson and Pauline, were both architects; they helped build three of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. If Zeus ate a few million pounds of glass, steel, and concrete, his offal would look something like those buildings. However fecal, those monstrosities won awards and made Wilson and Pauline very popular and wealthy. They lived in a self-designed home on Lake Washington that was lovely and tasteful in all ways except for its ridiculously turquoise exterior. I don’t know whether they painted the house turquoise to honor the sacred stone of the Southwest or if they were being ironic: Ha! We’re Apache Indians from the desert, and this is our big blue house on the water! Deal with it!

  Sharon and I were Native American royalty, the aboriginal prince and princess of western Washington. Sure, we’d been thoroughly defeated by white culture, but dang it, we were conquered and assimilated National Merit Scholars in St. Junior’s English honors department.

  Sharon and I were in love and happy and young and skinny and beautiful and hyperliterate. We recited Shakespeare monologues as foreplay: To be or not to be, take off your panties, oh, Horatio, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, I’m going to wear your panties now. All over campus, we were known as Sharon-and-David-the-Bohemian-Indians. We were inseparable. We ate our meals together and fed each other. Risking expulsion for moral violations, we sneaked into each other’s dorm rooms at night and made love while our respective roommates covered their heads with pillows. Sharon and I always tried to take the same classes and mourned the other’s absence whenever we couldn’t. We read the same books and discussed them while we were naked and intertwined. Oh Lord, we were twins conjoined at the brain, heart, and crotch.

  I proposed to Sharon on the first day of our senior year, and she accepted, and we planned to secretly elope on the day after our graduation.

  In June, the day before graduation, Sharon and I were taking one last walk along the path beside the anonymous creek that ran through the middle of campus. We were saying good-bye to a good place. Overgrown with fern and blackberry thickets, the creek had been left wild and wet.

  “‘Whose woods these are I think I know’,” I said.

  “Robert Frost wrote the poem,” said Sharon. We were playing Name the Poet, a game of our own invention.

  “‘Know’ and ‘poem,’” I said. “A clumsy rhyme, don’t you think?”

  “You stink,” she said and laughed too loudly. Her joy was always rowdy, rude, and pervasive. I laughed with her and pulled her close to me and pressed my face into her hair and breathed in her scent. After the first time we’d made love, she’d said, Now I know what you smell like, and no matter what else happens to us, I’m always going to know what you smell like.

  “Hey,” I said as we walked the creek. “How about we climb into the bushes and I get you a little wild and wet?”

  We kissed and kissed until she pulled away.

  “Do you hear that?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think it’s a cat. Can you hear it meowing?”

  I listened and heard nothing.

  “You’re imagining things,” I said.

  “No, it’s a cat. I can hear it. It sounds pitiful.”

  “There must be a hundred cats around here. City cats. They’re tough.”

  “No, it sounds hurt. Listen.”

  I listened and finally heard the faint feline cry.

  “It’s down there in the creek somewhere,” she said.

  We peered over the edge and could barely see the water through the thick and thorny overgrowth.

  “I’m sure it’s hunting rats or something,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “No, listen to it. It’s crying. I think it’s stuck.”

  “What do you want me to do? It’s just a dumb-ass cat.”

  “Can you go find it?”

  I looked again at the jungle between that cat and me.

  “I’d need a machete to get through there,” I said.

  “Please,” said Sharon.

  “I’m going to get all cut up.”

  “‘All in green went my love riding,’” she whispered in that special way, “‘on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.’”

  “Cummings wrote the poem, and I’m in love and gone,” I said and made my slow way down the creek side. I didn’t want to save the cat; I wanted to preserve Sharon’s high opinion of me. If she hadn’t been there to push me down the slope, I never would have gone after that cat. As it was, I cursed the world as I tripped over ferns and pushed blackberry branches out of the way. I was cut and scraped and threatened by spiders and wasps, all for a dumb cat.

  “It’s like Wild Kingdom down here,” I said.

  “Do you see him?” she said, more worried about the cat. I could hear the love in her voice. I was jealous of that damn cat!

  I stopped and listened. I heard the cry from somewhere close.

  “He’s right around here,” I said.

  “Find him,” she said, her voice choking with fierce tears.

  I leaned over, pushed aside one last fern, and saw him, a black cat trapped in blackberry branches. He was starved, too skinny to be alive, I thought, but his eyes were bright with fear and pain.

  “Man,” I said. “I think he’s been caught in here for a long time.”

  “Save him, save him.”

  I reached in, expecting the cat to bite or claw me, but he remained gratefully passive as I tore away the branches and freed him. I lifted and carried him back up the bank. He was dirty and smelly, and I wanted all of this to be over.

  “Oh my God,” said Sharon as she took him from me. “Oh, he’s so sad, so sad.” She hugged him, and he accepted it without protest.

  “What are we going to do with him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can’t keep him,” I said. “Let’s let him go here. He’s free now. He’ll be okay.”

  “What if he gets stuck again?”

  “Then it’ll be natural selection. Come on, he doesn’t have a tag or anything. He’s just a stray cat.”

  “No, he’s tame, he’s got a home somewhere.” She stared the cat in the eyes as if he could tell us his phone number and address.

  “Oh, wait, wait,” she said. “I remember, in the newspaper, last week or something, there was a lost-cat ad. It said he was black with white heart-shaped fur on his belly.”

  Sharon had a supernatural memory; she could meet a few dozen new people at a party and rattle off their names two days later. During an English-department party our sophomore year, she recited by memory seventy-three Shakespeare sonnets in a row. It was the most vol
uminous display of erudition any of us had ever witnessed. Tenured English professors wept. But I was the one who enjoyed the honor and privilege of taking her home that night and making her grunt in repetitive monosyllables.

  Beside the creek, Sharon gently turned the cat over, and we both saw the white heart. Without another word, Sharon ran back to her dorm room, and I followed her. She searched for the newspaper in her desk but couldn’t find it, and none of her floormates had a copy of the old paper, either, so she ran into the basement and climbed into the Dumpster. I held the cat while she burrowed into the fetid pile of garbage.

  “Come on,” I said. “You’re never going to find it. Maybe you imagined the whole thing. Let’s take him to the shelter. They can take care of him.”

  She ignored me and kept searching. I felt like throwing the cat into the wall.

  “This is it,” she said and pulled a greasy newspaper out of the mess. She flipped to the classifieds, found the lost-cat ad, and shouted out the phone number. She jumped out of the Dumpster, grabbed the cat, ran back to her room, and quickly dialed.

  “Hello,” said Sharon over the telephone. “We have your cat. Yes, yes, yes. We found him by the creek. At St. Junior’s. We’ll bring him right over. What’s your address? Oh God, that’s really close.”

  Sharon ran out of the dorm; I ran after her.

  “Slow down,” I called after her, but she ignored me. Maybe Sharon wasn’t a good Apache or Catholic, but she was religious when she found the proper mission.

  We sprinted through a residential neighborhood, which may or may not have been a good idea for two brown kids, no matter how high our grade-point averages. But it felt good to run fast, and I dreamed about being a superhero. Fifteen minutes later and out of breath, Sharon knocked on the front door of a small house. An old couple opened the door.

  “Lester,” shouted the old man and took the cat from Sharon. The old woman hugged the man and the cat. All three cried to one another.