“It owns a small auto shop in beautiful Edmonton, British Columbia.”
“Bear’s Repairs?”
“Exactly.”
We laughed together at our silly joke, until he coughed and gagged. My father, once a handsome man who’d worn string ties and fedoras, was now an old man, a tattered bathrobe on a stick.
“Excuse me,” he said, strangely polite, as he spat into his cup.
We ate without further conversation. What was there to say? He slurped his soup, a culinary habit that had irritated me throughout our lives together, but I didn’t mind it at all as we shared that particular meal.
“When are you heading back to Spokane?” he asked after he finished eating and pushed away his empty bowl.
“I’m not.”
“Don’t you have to teach?”
“I took a leave of absence. I think the Catholic teenagers of Spokane, Washington, can diagram sentences and misread To Kill a Mockingbird without me.”
“Are you sure about that, Atticus?”
“Positive.”
He picked at his teeth with his tongue. He was thinking hard.
“What are you going to do about money?” he asked.
“I’ve got some saved up,” I said. Of course, in my economic dictionary, I’d discovered some meant very little. I had three thousand dollars in savings and maybe five hundred in checking. I’d been hoping it would last six months, or until my father died. By the light in his eyes, I knew he was guessing at exactly how much I’d saved and also wondering if it would last. He carried a tiny life insurance policy that would pay for the cost of his burial.
“It’s you and me, then,” he said.
“Yes.”
He wouldn’t look at me. “What do you think they did with them?”
“With what?”
“My feet,” he said. We both looked down at his legs, at the bandaged stumps where his feet used to be.
“I think they burn them,” I said.
What is an Indian?
That’s what the professor wrote on the chalkboard three minutes into the first class of my freshman year at Washington State University.
What is an Indian?
The professor’s name was Dr. Lawrence Crowell (don’t forget the doctorate!) and he was, according to his vita, a Cherokee-Choctaw-Seminole-Irish-Russian Indian from Hot Springs, Kentucky, or some such place.
“What is an Indian?” asked Dr. Crowell. He paced around the small room—there were twenty of us terrified freshmen—and looked each of us in the eyes. He was a small man, barely over five feet tall, with gray eyes and grayer hair.
“What is an Indian?” he asked me as he stood above me. I suppose he might have been trying to tower over me, but I was nearly as tall as he was even while sitting down, so that bit of body language failed to translate in his favor.
“Are you an Indian?” he asked me.
Of course I was. (Jesus, my black hair hung down past my ass and I was dark as a pecan!) I’d grown up on my reservation with my tribe. I understood most of the Spokane language, though I’d always spoken it like a Jesuit priest. Hell, I’d been in three car wrecks! And most important, every member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians could tell you the exact place and time where I’d lost my virginity. Why? Because I’d told each and every one of them. I mean, I knew the real names, nicknames, and secret names of every dog that had lived on my reservation during the last twenty years.
“Yeah, I’m Indian,” I said.
“What kind?” asked Dr. Crowell.
“Spokane.”
“And that’s all you are?”
“Yeah.”
“Your mother is Spokane?”
“Full-blood.”
“And your father as well?”
“Full-blood.”
“Really? Isn’t that rare for your tribe? I thought the Spokanes were very mixed.”
“Well, my dad once tried to make it with a Cherokee-Choctaw-Seminole-Irish-Russian, but poor guy, he just couldn’t get it up.”
My classmates laughed.
“You know,” I added. “My momma always used to tell me, those mixed-blood Indians, they just ain’t sexy enough.”
My classmates laughed even louder.
“Get out of my classroom,” Dr. Crowell said to me. “And don’t come back until you can show me some respect. I am your elder.”
“Yes, sir,” I said and left the room.
Of course, my mother’s opinion about the general desirability of mixed-blood Indians had been spoken mostly in jest. She had always been a funny woman.
“I mean, there’s so many sexy white guys in the world,” my mother had once told me. “There are white guys who like being white, and what’s not to like? They own everything. So, if you get the chance to sleep with a real white guy, especially one of them with a British accent or something, or Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, then why are you going to waste your time on some white guy who says he’s part Indian? Jeez, if I wanted to sleep with part-Indians, then I could do that at every powwow. Hell, I could get an orgy going with eight or nine of those Cherokees and maybe, just maybe, they would all add up to one real Indian.”
“And besides all that, listen to me, son,” she’d continued. “If your whole mission in life is to jump an Indian, then why not jump the Indian with the most Indian going on inside of him? And honey, believe me when I say that every last inch of your daddy is Indian.”
She’d laughed then and hugged me close. She’d always loved to talk nasty. For her, the telling of a dirty joke had always been the most traditional and sacred portion of any conversation.
“If I’m going after a penis only because it’s Indian,” my mother had said, “then it better be a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed, American Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, indigenous penis. Hey, I don’t want to get into some taste test, and realize one of these penises is Coke and the other one is Pepsi.”
Tears had rolled down her face as she’d laughed. At that moment, I loved her so much that I could barely breathe. I was twelve years old and she was teaching me about sex and all of its complications.
Her best piece of sexual advice: “Son, if you’re going to marry a white woman, then marry a rich one, because those white-trash women are just Indians with bad haircuts.”
The last thing she ever said to me: “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”
Of course, my mother would have felt only contempt for a man like Dr. Lawrence Crowell, not because he was a white man who wanted to be Indian (God! When it came right down to it, Indian was the best thing to be!), but because he thought he was entitled to tell other Indians what it meant to be Indian.
What is an Indian? Is it a son who brings his father to school as show-and-tell?
“Excuse me, sir,” Crowell said to my father as we both walked into the room. “Are you in my class?”
“Sweetheart,” said my father. “You’re in my class now.”
After that, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t need to say a word. My father sat at a desk, pulled out his false teeth, tucked them into his pants pocket, and smiled his black-hole smile the whole time. My father also wore a U.S. Army T-shirt that said Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. Of course, my father had never actually served in the military (He was a pacifist!) but he knew how to wield the idea of a gun.
“What is an Indian?” Crowell asked as he stood in front of the classroom.
My father raised his left hand.
“Anybody?” asked the professor.
With his hand high above his head, my father stood from his chair.
“Anybody?”
My father dropped his hand, walked up to the front, and stood directly in front of Crowell.
“Sir,” he said to my father. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Are you an Indian?”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
“I don’t know,” said my father. “Now, you may h
ave some Indian blood. I can see a little bit of that aboriginal bone structure in your face, but you ain’t Indian. No. You might even hang out with some Indians. Maybe even get a little of the ha-ha when one of the women is feeling sorry for you. But you ain’t Indian. No. You might be a Native American but you sure as hell ain’t Indian.”
“Listen, I don’t have to take this from you. Do you want me to call security?”
“By the time security arrived, I could carefully insert your right foot deep into your own rectum.”
I hid my face and stifled my laughter. My father hadn’t been in a fistfight since sixth grade and she’d beaten the crap out of him.
“Are you an Indian?” my father asked again.
“I was at Alcatraz during the occupation.”
“That was, what, November ’69?”
“Yeah, I was in charge of communications. How about you?”
“I took my wife and kids to the Pacific Ocean, just off Neah Bay. Most beautiful place in the world.”
Though I’d been only three years old at the time, I remembered brief images of the water, the whales, and the Makah Indians who lived there in Neah Bay, or perhaps I had only stolen my memories, my images, from my father’s stories. In hearing his stories a thousand times over the years, had I unconsciously memorized them, had I colonized them and pretended they were mine? One theory: we can fool ourselves into believing any sermon if we repeat it enough times. Proof of theory: the number of times in his life the average human whispers Amen. What I know: I’m a liar. What I remember or imagine I remember: we stayed in Neah Bay during the off-season, so there were very few tourists, though tourists had rarely visited Neah Bay before or since that time, not until the Makahs had decided to resume their tradition of hunting whales. The tourists came because they wanted to see the blood. Everybody, white and Indian alike, wanted to see the blood.
What is an Indian? Is it a man with a spear in his hands?
“What about Wounded Knee?” Crowell asked my father. “I was at Wounded Knee. Where were you?”
“I was teaching my son here how to ride his bike. Took forever. And when he finally did it, man, I cried like a baby, I was so proud.”
“What kind of Indian are you? You weren’t part of the revolution.”
“I’m a man who keeps promises.”
It was mostly true. My father had kept most of his promises, or had tried to keep all of his promises, except this one: he never stopped eating sugar.
After we shared that dinner of homemade tomato soup, my father slept in his bed while I sat awake in the living room and watched the white noise of the television. My father’s kidneys and liver were beginning to shut down. Shut down. So mechanical. At that moment, if I had closed my eyes, I could have heard the high-pitched whine of my father’s engine (it was working too hard!) and the shudder of his chassis. In his sleep, he was climbing a hill (downshifting all the way!) and might not make it over the top.
At three that morning, I heard my father coughing, and then I heard him retching, gagging. I raced into his room, flipped on the light, and discovered him drenched in what I thought was blood.
“It’s the soup, it’s just the soup,” he said and laughed at the fear in my face. “I threw up the soup. It’s tomatoes, the tomatoes.”
I undressed him and washed his naked body. His skin had once been dark and taut, but it had grown pale and loose.
“You know how to get rid of tomato stains?” he asked.
“With carbonated water,” I said.
“Yeah, but how do you get rid of carbonated-water stains?”
I washed his belly, washed the skin that was blue with cold and a dozen tattoos. I washed his arms and hands. I washed his legs and penis.
“You shouldn’t have to do this,” he said, his voice cracking. “You’re not a nurse.”
What is an Indian? Is it a son who had always known where his father kept his clothes in neat military stacks?
I pulled a T-shirt over my father’s head. I slipped a pair of boxer shorts over his bandaged legs and up around his waist.
“How’s the bear?” I asked him, and he laughed until he gagged again, but there was nothing left in his stomach for him to lose. He was still laughing when I switched off the light, lay down beside him, and pulled the old quilt over us.
“You remember when I first made the tomato soup?” he asked me.
“Yeah, that summer at Ankeny’s.”
“The summer of Carla, as I recall.”
“I didn’t know you knew about her.”
“Jeez, you told everybody. That’s why she wouldn’t do it with you anymore. You hurt her feelings. You should have kept your mouth shut.”
“I had no idea.”
I wondered what would happen if I saw her again. Would she remember me with fondness or with regret?
“Before I threw up my soup, I was dreaming,” he said.
“About what?”
“I was dreaming there was a knock on the door and I got up and walked over there. I wasn’t walking on my stumps or anything. I was just sort of floating. And the knocking on the door was getting louder and louder. And I was getting mad, you know?”
I knew.
“And then I open up the door,” continued my father. “And I’m ready to yell, ready to shout, what the hell you want, right? But I don’t see anybody right away, until I look down, and there they are.”
“Your feet.”
“My feet.”
“Wow.”
“Wow, enit? Exactly. Wow. There’s my feet, my bare-ass feet just standing there on the porch.”
“They talked, enit?”
“Damn right, they talked. These little mouths opened up on the big toes, like some crazy little duet, and sang in Spanish.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“No, but they kept singing about Mexico.”
“You ever been to Mexico?”
“No. Never even been to California.”
I thought about my father’s opportunities and his failures, about the man he should have been and the man he had become. What is an Indian? Is it a man with a good memory? I thought about the pieces of my father—his children and grandchildren, his old shoes and unfinished novels—scattered all over the country. He was a man orphaned at six by his father’s soldierly death in Paris, France, and, three months later, by his mother’s cancerous fall in Spokane, Washington. I thought about my mother’s funeral and how my father had climbed into the coffin with her and how we, the stronger and weaker men of the family, had to pull him out screaming and kicking. I wondered if there was some kind of vestigial organ inside all of us that collected and stored our grief.
“Well, then, damn it,” I said. “We’re going to Mexico.”
Two hours later, my father and I sat (he couldn’t do anything but sit!) in Wonder Horse’s garage, which was really a converted old barn, while Wonder Horse and Sweetwater, reunited for this particular occasion, gave my battered van a quick tune-up.
“Hey,” said Wonder Horse. “You’ve been treating this van like it was a white man. It’s all messed up.”
Sweetwater, having returned to his usual and accustomed silence, nodded his head in agreement.
“You see,” continued Wonder Horse. “You have to treat your car with love. And I don’t mean love of an object. You see, that’s just wrong. That’s materialism. You have to love your car like it’s a sentient being, like it can love you back. Now, that’s some deep-down agape love. And you want to know why you should love your car like it can love you back?”
“Why?” asked my father and I simultaneously.
“Because it shows faith,” said Wonder Horse. “And that’s the best thing we Indians have left.”
Sweetwater pointed at Wonder Horse—a gesture of agreement, of affirmation, of faith.
I looked around Wonder Horse’s garage, at the dozens of cars and pieces of cars strewn about. Most of them would never run again and served only as depositories for spar
e parts.
“What about all of these cars?” I asked. “They don’t look so well loved.”
“These selfless automobiles are organ donors,” said Wonder Horse. “And there’s no greater act of faith than that.”
“I’m an organ donor,” I said. “Says so right on my driver’s license.”
“That just means you’re a potential organ donor,” said Wonder Horse. “Ain’t nothing wrong with potential, but it ain’t real until it’s real.”
“Well, you’re potentially an asshole,” I said. “With a whole lot of potential to get wider and wider.”
The four of us, we all laughed; we were Indian men enjoying one another’s company. It happens all the time.
“I mean,” said Wonder Horse. “What would you be willing to give up to ensure somebody else’s happiness?”
“That’s a big question,” said my father.
“Tell me a big answer,” said Wonder Horse, and then he asked me this: “I mean, if you could give up your feet, would you give them to your father?”
“Oh, jeez,” said my father before I could answer. “Now we’re talking about potential. What kind of goofy operation would that be? I mean, if you could really do that, you wouldn’t take away living people’s feet, enit? You’d transplant dead people’s feet.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Sweetwater, then returned to his silence.
“Damn right, it’s disgusting,” said my father. “I mean, who’s to guarantee I’d get Indian feet? What if I got white feet? I’d be an Indian guy walking around on some white guy’s feet.”
“Hey, Long John Silver,” said Wonder Horse. “That would mean your feet would have a job, but you’d be unemployed.”
We all laughed again. We could afford to laugh because all four of us carried money in our wallets.
“But, come on,” Wonder Horse said to me. “Enough of the jokes. Would you give up your feet for your father?”
I looked at my father. He would be dead soon, maybe tomorrow, perhaps by the first snowfall, certainly by this time next year. I asked myself this: If I could take the days and years I had left to live, all of my remaining time, then divide that number by two, and give half of my life expectancy to my father, thereby extending his time on the planet, would I do it?