The Toughest Indian in the World: Stories

  “Hey,” I said. “I think, I think maybe—well, I think you should leave now.”

  “Yeah,” said the fighter, not surprised. I heard him softly singing as he dressed and stuffed all of his belongings into his pack. I wanted to know what he was singing, so I opened the bathroom door just as he was opening the door to leave. He stopped, looked at me, and smiled.

  “Hey, tough guy,” he said. “You were good.”

  The fighter walked out the door, left it open, and walked away. I stood in the doorway and watched him continue his walk down the highway, past the city limits. I watched him rise from earth to sky and become a new constellation. I closed the door and wondered what was going to happen next. Feeling uncomfortable and cold, I went back into the bathroom. I ran the shower with the hottest water possible. I stared at myself in the mirror. Steam quickly filled the room. I threw a few shadow punches. Feeling stronger, I stepped into the shower and searched my body for changes. A middle-aged man needs to look for tumors. I dried myself with a towel too small for the job. Then I crawled naked into bed. I wondered if I was a warrior in this life and if I had been a warrior in a previous life. Lonely and laughing, I fell asleep. I didn’t dream at all, not one bit. Or perhaps I dreamed but remembered none of it. Instead, I woke early the next morning, before sunrise, and went out into the world. I walked past my car. I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day’s sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die. At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon.

  CLASS

  SHE WANTED TO KNOW if I was Catholic.

  I was completely unprepared to respond with any degree of clarity to such a dangerous question. After all, we had been talking about the shrimp appetizers (which were covered with an ambitious pesto sauce) and where they fit, in terms of quality, in our very separate histories of shrimp appetizers in particular and seafood appetizers in general. I’d just been describing to her how cayenne and lobster seemed to be mortal enemies, one of the more secular and inane culinary observations I’d ever made, when she’d focused her blue eyes on me, really looked at me for the first time in the one minute and thirty-five seconds we’d known each other, and asked me if I was Catholic.

  How do you answer a question like that, especially when you’ve just met the woman at one of those house parties where you’d expected to know everybody in attendance but had gradually come to realize that you knew only the host couple, and then only well enough to ask about the welfare of the two kids (a boy and a girl or two boys) you thought they parented? As far as I could tell, there were no priests, ministers, or pastors milling about, so I had no easy visual aids in guessing at the dominant denomination in the room. If there’d been a Jesuit priest, Hasidic rabbi, or Tibetan monk drinking a pale ale over by the saltwater aquarium, I might have known the best response, the clever, scintillating answer that would have compelled her to take me home with her for a long night of safe and casual sex.

  “Well,” she asked again, with a musical lilt in her voice. “Are you Catholic?”

  Her left eye was a significantly darker blue than the right.

  “Your eyes,” I said, trying to change the subject. “They’re different.”

  “I’m blind in this one,” she said, pointing to the left eye.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, mortified by my lack of decorum.

  “Why? It was my big brother who stabbed me with the pencil. He didn’t mean it, though.”

  She told the story as if she’d only skinned a knee or received a slight concussion, as if the injury had been temporary.

  “He was aiming for my little sister’s eye,” she added. “But she ducked. She was always more athletic than me.”

  “Where’s your sister now?”

  “She’s dead. Car wreck. Bang, bang, bang.”

  So much pain for such a white woman. I wondered how often a man can say the wrong thing during the course of a particular conversation.

  “What about your brother?” I asked, praying that he had not been driving the car that killed her sister.

  “He’s right over there,” she said and pointed at a handsome man, taller than everybody else in the room, who was sitting on the carpeted stairs with a woman whose red hair I’d been admiring all evening. Though engaged in what appeared to be a passionate conversation, the brother sensed his sister’s attention and looked up. Both of his eyes were the same shade of blue as her good eye.

  “He’s the one who did it,” she said and tapped her blind eye.

  In response, the brother smiled and tapped his left eye. He could see perfectly.

  “You cruel bastard,” she mouthed at him, though she made it sound like an affectionate nickname, like a tender legacy from childhood.

  “You cruel bastard,” she repeated. Her brother could obviously read her lips because he laughed again, loud enough for me to hear him over the din of the party, and hugged the redhead in a tender but formal way that indicated they’d made love only three or four times in their young relationship.

  “Your brother,” I said, trying to compliment her by complimenting the family genetics. “He’s good-looking.”

  “He’s okay,” she said.

  “He’s got your eyes.”

  “Only one of them, remember,” she said and moved one step closer to me. “Now, quit trying to change the subject. Tell me. Are you Catholic or are you not Catholic?”

  “Baptized,” I said. “But not confirmed.”

  “That’s very ambiguous.”

  “I read somewhere that many women think ambiguity is sexy.”

  “Not me. I like men who are very specific.”

  “You don’t like mystery?”

  “I always know who did it,” she said and moved so close that I could smell the red wine and dinner mints on her breath.

  I took a step back.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m not drunk. And I just chewed on a few Altoids because I thought I might be kissing somebody very soon.”

  She could read minds. She was also drunk enough that her brother had already pocketed the keys to her Lexus.

  “Who is this somebody you’re going to be kissing?” I asked. “And why just somebody? That sounds very ambiguous to me.”

  “And very sexy,” she said and touched my hand. Blond, maybe thirty-five, and taller than me, she was the tenth most attractive white woman in the room. I always approached the tenth most attractive white woman at any gathering. I didn’t have enough looks, charm, intelligence, or money to approach anybody more attractive than that, and I didn’t have enough character to approach the less attractive. Crassly speaking, I’d always made sure to play ball only with my equals.

  “You’re Indian,” she said, stretching the word into three syllables and nearly a fourth.

  “Do you like that?”

  “I like your hair,” she said, touching the black braids that hung down past my chest. I’d been growing the braids since I’d graduated from law school. My hair impressed jurors but irritated judges. Perfect.

  “I like your hair, too,” I said and brushed a pale strand away from her forehead. I counted three blemishes and one mole on her face. I wanted to kiss the tips of her fingers. Women expected kisses on the parts of their bodies hidden by clothes, the private places, but were often surprised when I paid more attention to their public features: hands, hairline, the soft skin around their eyes.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m just pretty. But pretty is good enough.”

  I still didn’t know her name, but I could have guessed at it. Her generation of white women usually carried two-syllable names, like Becky, Erin, and Wendy, or monosyllabic nicknames that lacked any adornment. Peg, Deb, or Sam. Efficient names, quick-in-the-shower names, just-brush-it-and-go names. Her mother and her mother’s friends would be
known by more ornate monikers, and if she had daughters, they would be named after their grandmothers. The country was filling up with little white girls named Rebecca, Elizabeth, and Willamena.

  “Sara,” I guessed. “Your name is Sara.”

  “With or without an h?” she asked.

  “Without,” I said, pleased with my psychic ability.

  “Actually, it’s neither. My name is Susan. Susan McDermott. Without the h.”

  “I’m Edgar Eagle Runner,” I said, though my driver’s license still read Edgar Joseph.

  “Eagle Runner,” she repeated, feeling the shape of my name fill her mouth, then roll past her tongue, teeth, and lips.

  “Susan,” I said.

  “Eagle Runner,” she whispered. “What kind of Indian are you?”

  “Spokane.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “We’re a small tribe. Salmon people.”

  “The salmon are disappearing,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, they are.”

  Susan McDermott and I were married in a small ceremony seven months later in St. Therese Catholic Church in Madrona, a gentrified neighborhood ten minutes from downtown Seattle. She’d been baptized at St. Therese as a toddler by a Jesuit who many years later went hiking on Mount Rainier and vanished. Father David or Joseph or Father Something Biblical. She didn’t remember anything about him, neither the color of his hair nor the exact shape of his theology, but she thought that his disappearance was a metaphor for her love life.

  “One day, many years ago,” she said, “my heart walked into the snow and vanished. But then you found it and gave it heat.”

  “Is that a simile or a metaphor?” I asked.

  “It might be an analogy,” she said.

  Our vows were witnessed by three dozen of Susan’s best friends, along with most of her coworkers at the architecture firm, but Susan’s handsome brother and parents stayed away as a protest against my pigmentation.

  “I can understand fucking him,” her brother had said upon hearing the news of our engagement. “But why do you want to share a checking account?”

  He was so practical.

  Half of the partners and all of my fellow associates from the law firm showed up to watch me tie the knot.

  Velma, my dark-skinned mother, was overjoyed by my choice of mate. She’d always wanted me to marry a white woman and beget half-breed children who would marry white people who would beget quarter-bloods, and so on and so on, until simple mathematics killed the Indian in us.

  When asked, my mother told white people she was Spanish, not Mexican, not Hispanic, not Chicana, and certainly not Spokane Indian with a little bit of Aztec thrown in for spice, even though she was all of these things.

  As for me, I’d told any number of white women that I was part Aztec and I’d told a few that I was completely Aztec. That gave me some mystery, some ethnic weight, a history of glorious color and mass executions. Strangely enough, there were aphrodisiacal benefits to claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals. In any event, pretending to be an Aztec warrior was a lot more impressive than revealing I was just some bright kid who’d fought his way off the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State and was now a corporate lawyer in Seattle who pretended to have a lot more money that he did.

  I’d emptied my meager savings account to pay for the wedding and reception, refusing to allow Susan to help, though she made twice what I did. I was living paycheck to paycheck, a bizarre circumstance for a man whose monthly wage exceeded his mother’s yearly income as a social worker in the small city of Spokane, Washington.

  My mother was an Indian woman who taught drunk white people not to drink, stoned whites not to smoke, and abusive whites not to throw the punch. A simple and honorable job. She was very good at it and I loved her. She wore a black dress to the wedding, nearly funeral wear, but brightened it with a salmon-colored scarf and matching shoes.

  I counted seventeen white women at the wedding. On an average day, Susan would have been the fourth or fifth most attractive. On this, her wedding day, dressed in an ivory gown with plunging neckline, she was easily the most beautiful white woman in the chapel; she was more serene, sexy, and spiritual than the wooden Mary hanging on the west wall or the stained-glassed Mary filling up one of the windows.

  Susan’s niece, an eighteen-year-old, served as her maid of honor. She modeled teen wear for Nordstrom’s. I tried not to stare at her. My best man was one of the partners in the law firm where I worked.

  “Hey, Runner,” he had said just before the ceremony began. “I love you, man.”

  I’d hugged him, feeling guilty. My friendship with him was strictly professional.

  During the ceremony, he cried. I couldn’t believe it. I’m not one of those men who believe tears are a sign of weakness. On the contrary, I believe it’s entirely appropriate, even attractive, for a man to cry under certain circumstances, but my wedding was not tear-worthy. In fact, there was a decided lack of emotion during the ceremony, mostly due to the absence of Susan’s immediate family.

  My mother was the only member of my family sitting in the pews, but that didn’t bother or surprise me. She was the only one I had invited.

  The ceremony itself was short and simple, because Susan believed brevity was always more elegant, and more sexy, than excess. I agreed with her.

  “I will,” she said.

  “I will,” I said.

  We did.

  During the first two years of our marriage, we attended thirty-seven cocktail parties, eighteen weddings, one divorce, seven Christmas parties, two New Year’s Eve parties, three New Year’s Day parties, nine birthday parties—only one of them for a child under the age of eighteen—six opera performances, nine literary readings, twelve museum openings, one museum closing, three ballets, including a revival of Swan Lake in New York City, one spouse-swapping party we left before we took off our coats, and thirty-two films, including most of those nominated for Oscars and two or three that had screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

  I attended business lunches Monday through Friday, and occasionally on Saturdays, while Susan kept her Friday lunches free so she could carry on an affair with an architect named Harry. She’d begun the affair a few days after our first anniversary and it had gone on for seven months before she’d voluntarily quit him, never having known that I’d known about the tryst, that I’d discovered his love letters hidden in a shoe box at the bottom of her walk-in closet.

  I hadn’t been snooping on her when I’d found the letters and I didn’t bother to read any of them past the salutation that began each. “My love, my love, my love,” they’d read, three times, always three times, like a chant, like a prayer. Brokenhearted, betrayed, I’d kept the letters sacred by carefully placing them back, intact and unread, in the shoe box and sliding the box back into its hiding place.

  I suppose I could have exacted revenge on her by sleeping with one or more of her friends or coworkers. I’d received any number of subtle offers to do such a thing, but I didn’t want to embarrass her. Personal pain should never be made public. Instead, in quiet retaliation, I patronized prostitutes whenever I traveled out of town. Miami, Los Angeles, Boston. Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston.

  In San Francisco for a deposition hearing, I called the first service listed in the Yellow Pages.

  “A-1 Escorts,” said the woman. A husky voice, somehow menacing. I’m sure her children hated the sound of it, even as I found myself aroused by its timbre.

  “A-1 Escorts,” she said again when I did not speak.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi. Hello. Uh, I’m looking for some company this evening.”

  “Where you at?”

  “The Prescott.”

  “Nice place.”

  “Yeah, they have whirlpool bathtubs.”

  “Water sports will cost you extra.”

  “Oh, no, no, no. I’m, uh, rather traditional.”

  “Okay, Mr. Traditional, what are you looking for?”


  I’d slept with seventeen prostitutes, all of them blond and blue-eyed. Twelve of them had been busty while the other five had been small-breasted. Eight of them had claimed to be college students; one of them even had a chemistry textbook in her backpack.

  “Do you employ any Indian women?” I asked.

  “Indian? Like with the dot in the forehead?”

  “No, no, that’s East Indian. From India. I’m looking for American Indian. You know, like Tonto.”

  “We don’t have any boys.”

  “Oh, no, I mean, I want an Indian woman.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. Was she looking through some kind of catalogue? Searching her inventory for the perfect woman for me? Was she calling other escort companies, looking for a referral? I wanted to hang up the phone. I’d never had intercourse with an Indian woman.

  “Yeah, we got somebody. She’s a pro.”

  “What do you mean by pro?”

  “She used to work pornos.”

  “Pornos?”

  “Dirty movies? X-rated? You got them right there on the pay-per-view in your room, buddy.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “She calls herself Tawny Feather.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I never kid.”

  I wondered what kind of Indian woman would call herself Tawny Feather. Sexually speaking, Indian women and men are simultaneously promiscuous and modest. That’s a contradiction, but it also happens to be the truth. I just couldn’t imagine an Indian woman who would star in pornographic movies.

  “Well, you want a date or not?” asked the husky-voiced woman.

  “How much?”

  “How much you got?”

  “How much you want?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Sold,” I said.

  “What room?”

  “1216.”

  “Who should she ask for?”

  “Geronimo.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said and hung up the phone.

  Less than an hour later, there was a knock on the door. I peered through the peephole and saw her.

  Tawny Feather.

  She wore a conservative tan suit and a string of fake pearls. Dream-catcher earrings, turquoise rings, a stainless-steel eagle pinned to her lapel. Good camouflage. Professional but eccentric. She looked like a woman on her way to or from a meeting. She looked like a woman with an Individualized Retirement Account.