War Dances

  Yes, that was my first official public statement about the death of Elder Briggs. It didn’t take clever editing to make me look evil; I had accomplished this in one take, live and uncut.

  I was suddenly the most hated man in Seattle. And the most beloved. My fellow liberals spoke of my lateral violence and the destructive influence of colonialism on the indigenous, while conservatives lauded my defensive stand and lonely struggle against urban crime. Local bloggers posted hijacked footage of the most graphically violent films I’d edited.

  And finally, a local news program obtained rough footage of the film I’d been working on when Elder Briggs broke into my house. Though I had, through judicious editing, been trying to protect the young actress, a black actress, the news only played the uncut footage of the obviously frightened and confused woman. And when the reporters ambushed her—her name was Tracy—she, of course, could only respond that, yes, she felt as if she’d been violated. I didn’t blame her for that; I agreed with her. But none of that mattered. I could in no way dispute the story—the cleverly edited series of short films—that had been made about me. Yes, I was a victim, but I didn’t for one second forget that Elder Briggs was dead. I was ashamed and vilified, but I was alive.

  I spent most of that time alone in my basement, in the room where I had killed Elder Briggs. When one spends that much time alone, one ponders. And when one ponders, one creates theories—hypotheses, to explain the world. Oh, hell, forget rationalization; I was pissed, mostly at myself for failing to walk away from a dangerous situation. And I was certainly pissed at the local media, who had become as exploitative as any pornographic moviemaker. But I was also pissed at Althea and Elder Briggs.

  Yes, the kid was a decent athlete; yes, the kid was a decent student; yes, the kid was a decent person. But he had broken into my house. He had smashed my window and was stealing my DVDs and, if I had not been home, would have stolen my computer and television and stereo and every other valuable thing in my house. And his mother, Althea, instead of explaining why her good and decent son had broken and entered a stranger’s house, committing a felony, had instead decided to blame me and accuse me of being yet another white man who was always looking to maim another black kid—had already maimed generations of black kids—when in fact I was a reservation Indian who had been plenty fucked myself by generations of white men. So, Althea, do you want to get into a pain contest? Do you want to participate in the Genocidal Olympics? Whose tragic history has more breadth and depth and length?

  Oh, Althea, why the hell was your son in my house? And oh, my God, it was a Little League baseball bat! It was only twenty inches long and weighed less than three pounds. I could have hit one hundred men in the head—maybe one thousand or one million—and not done anything more than given them a headache. But on that one day, on that one bitter afternoon, I took a swing—a stupid, one-handed, unlucky cut—and killed a kid, a son, a young man who was making a bad decision but who maybe had brains and heart and soul enough to stop making bad decisions.

  Oh, Jesus, I murdered somebody’s potential.

  Oh, Mary, it was self-defense, but it was still murder. I confess: I am a killer.

  How does one survive these revelations? One just lives. Or, rather, one just finally walks out of his basement and realizes that the story is over. It’s old news. There are new villains and heroes, criminals and victims, to be defined and examined and tossed aside.

  Elder Briggs and I were suddenly and equally unimportant.

  My life became quiet again. I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It’s not oil that runs the world, it’s shame. My Max was always going to love me, even when he began to understand my limitations, I didn’t know what my wife thought of my weaknesses.

  Weeks later, in bed, after lovemaking, she interrogated me.

  “Honey,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “With that kid, did you lose your temper?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, you have lost your temper before.”

  “Just one time.”

  “Yes, but you broke your hand when you punched the wall.”

  “Do you think I lost my temper with Elder Briggs?” I asked.

  My wife paused before answering, and in that pause I heard all her doubt and fear. So I got out of bed, dressed, and left the house. I decided to drive to see a hot new independent film—a gory war flick that pretended to be antiwar—but first stepped into a mini-mart to buy candy I could smuggle into the theater.

  I was standing in the candy aisle, trying to decide between a PayDay and a Snickers, when a group of young black men walked into the store. They were drunk or high and they were cursing the world, but in a strangely friendly way. How is it that black men can make a word like motherfucker sound jovial?

  There are people—white folks, mostly—who are extremely uncomfortable in the presence of black people. And I know plenty of Indians—my parents, for example—who are also uncomfortable around black folks. As for me? I suppose I’d always been the kind of nonblack person who celebrated himself for not being uncomfortable around blacks. But now, as I watched those black men jostle one another up and down the aisles, I was afraid—no, I was nervous. What if they recognized me? What if they were friends of Elder Briggs? What if they attacked me?

  Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential. Those young black men paid for their energy drinks and left the store. I paid for my candy bar, walked out to my car, and drove toward the movie theater.

  One block later, I had to hit my brakes when those same black guys jaywalked across the street in front of me. All of them stared me down and walked as slowly as possible through the crosswalk. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years and I’d often had this same encounter with young black men. It was some remnant of the warrior culture, I suppose.

  When it had happened before, I had always made it a point to smile goofily and wave to the black men who were challenging me. Since they thought I was a dorky white guy, I’d behave like one. I’d be what they wanted me to be.

  But this time, when those black men walked in slow motion in front of me, I did not smile or laugh. I just stared back at them. I knew I could hit the gas and slam into them and hurt them, maybe even kill them. I knew I had that power. And I knew that I would not use that power. But what about these black guys? What power did they have? They could only make me wait at an intersection. And so I waited. I waited until they walked around the corner and out of my vision. I waited until another driver pulled up behind me and honked his horn. I was supposed to move, and so I went.

  Go, Ghost, Go

  At this university upon a hill,

  I meet a tenured professor

  Who’s strangely thrilled

  To list all of the oppressors—

  Past, present, and future—who have killed,

  Are killing, and will kill the indigenous.

  O, he names the standard suspects—

  Rich, white, and unjust—

  And I, a red man, think he’s correct,

  But why does he have to be so humorless?

  And how can he, a white man, fondly speak

  Of the Ghost Dance, the strange and cruel

  Ceremony

  That, if performed well, would have doomed

  All white men to hell, destroyed their colonies,

  And brought every dead Indian back to life?

  The professor says, “Brown people

  From all brown tribes

  Will burn skyscrapers and steeples.

  They’ll speak Spanish and carry guns and knives.

  Sherman, can’t you see that immigration

  Is the new and improved Ghost Dance?”

/>   All I can do is laugh and laugh

  And say, “Damn, you’ve got some imagination.

  You should write a screenplay about this shit—

  About some fictional city,

  Grown fat and pale and pretty,

  That’s destroyed by a Chicano apocalypse.”

  The professor doesn’t speak. He shakes his head

  And assaults me with his pity.

  I wonder how he can believe

  In a ceremony that requires his death.

  I think that he thinks he’s the new Jesus.

  He’s eager to get on that cross

  And pay the ultimate cost

  Because he’s addicted to the indigenous.

  Bird-watching at Night

  WHAT KIND OF BIRD is that?

  An owl.

  What kind of bird was that?

  Another owl.

  Oh, that one was too quick and small to be an owl. What was it?

  A quick and small owl.

  One night, when I was sixteen, I was driving with my girlfriend up on Little Falls Flat and this barn owl swooped down over the road, maybe fifty feet or so in front of us, and came flying straight toward our windshield. It was huge, pterodactyl-size, and my girlfriend screamed. And—well, I screamed, too, because that thing was heading straight for us, but you know what I did? I slammed on the gas and sped toward that owl. Do you know why I did that?

  Because you wanted to play chicken with the owl?

  Exactly.

  So what happened?

  When we were maybe a second from smashing into each other, that owl just flapped its wings, but barely. What’s a better word than flap? What’s a word that still means flap, but a smaller flap?

  How about slant?

  Oh, yes, that’s pretty good. So, like I was saying, as that owl was just about to smash into our windshield, it slanted its wings, and slanted up into the dark. And it was so friggin’ amazing, you know? I just slammed on the brakes and nearly slid into the ditch. And my girlfriend and I were sitting there in the dark with the engine tick, tick, ticking like some kind of bomb, but an existential bomb, like it was just measuring out the endless nothingness of our lives because that owl had nearly touched us but was gone forever. And I said something like, “That was magnificent,” and my girlfriend—you want to know what she said?

  She said something like, “I’m breaking up with you.”

  Damn, that’s exactly what she said. And I asked her, “Why are you breaking up with me?” And do you know what she said?

  She said, “I’m breaking up with you because you are not an owl.”

  Yes, yes, yes, and you know what? I have never stopped thinking about her. It’s been twenty-seven years, and I still miss her. Why is that?

  Brother, you don’t miss her. You miss the owl.

  After Building the Lego Star Wars Ultimate Death Star

  How many planets do you want to destroy?

  Don’t worry, Daddy, this is just a big toy,

  And there is nothing more fun than making noise.

  My sons, when I was a boy, I threw dirt clods

  And snow grenades stuffed with hidden rocks, and fought

  Enemies—other Indian boys—who thought,

  Like me, that joyful war turned us into gods.

  War Dances

  1. My Kafka Baggage

  A FEW YEARS AGO, after I returned from a trip to Los Angeles, I unpacked my bag and found a dead cockroach, shrouded by a dirty sock, in a bottom corner. “Shit,” I thought. “We’re being invaded.” And so I threw the unpacked clothes, books, shoes, and toiletries back into the suitcase, carried it out onto the driveway, and dumped the contents onto the pavement, ready to stomp on any other cockroach stowaways. But there was only the one cockroach, stiff and dead. As he lay on the pavement, I leaned closer to him. His legs were curled under his body. His head was tilted at a sad angle. Sad? Yes, sad. For who is lonelier than the cockroach without his tribe? I laughed at myself. I was feeling empathy for a dead cockroach. I wondered about its story. How had it got into my bag? And where? At the hotel in Los Angeles? In an airport baggage system? It didn’t originate in our house. We’ve kept those tiny bastards away from our place for fifteen years. So what had happened to this little vermin? Did he smell something delicious in my bag—my musky deodorant or some crumb of chocolate Power Bar—and climb inside, only to be crushed by the shifts of fate and garment bags? As he died, did he feel fear? Isolation? Existential dread?

  2. Symptoms

  Last summer, in reaction to various allergies I was suffering from, defensive mucous flooded my inner right ear and confused, frightened, untied, and unmoored me. Simply stated, I could not fucking hear a thing from that side, so I had to turn my head to understand what my two sons, ages eight and ten, were saying.

  “We’re hungry,” they said. “We keep telling you.”

  They wanted to be fed. And I had not heard them.

  “Mom would have fed us by now,” they said.

  Their mother had left for Italy with her mother two days ago. My sons and I were going to enjoy a boys’ week, filled with unwashed socks, REI rock wall climbing, and ridiculous heaps of pasta.

  “What are you going to cook?” my sons asked. “Why haven’t you cooked yet?”

  I’d been lying on the couch reading a book while they played and I had not realized that I’d gone partially deaf. So I, for just a moment, could only weakly blame the silence—no, the contradictory roar that only I could hear.

  Then I recalled the man who went to the emergency room because he’d woken having lost most, if not all, of his hearing. The doctor peered into one ear, saw an obstruction, reached in with small tweezers, and pulled out a cockroach, then reached into the other ear, and extracted a much larger cockroach. Did you know that ear wax is a delicacy for roaches?

  I cooked dinner for my sons—overfed them out of guilt—and cleaned the hell out of our home. Then I walked into the bathroom and stood close to my mirror. I turned my head and body at weird angles, and tried to see deeply into my congested ear. I sang hymns and prayed that I’d see a small angel trapped in the canal. I would free the poor thing, and she’d unfurl and pat dry her tiny wings, then fly to my lips and give me a sweet kiss for sheltering her metamorphosis.

  3. The Symptoms Worsen

  When I woke at three a.m., completely unable to hear out of my clogged right ear, and positive that a damn swarm of locusts was wedged inside, I left a message for my doctor, and told him that I would be sitting outside his office when he reported to work.

  This would be the first time I had been inside a health-care facility since my father’s last surgery.

  4. Blankets

  After the surgeon cut off my father’s right foot—no, half of my father’s right foot—and three toes from the left, I sat with him in the recovery room. It was more like a recovery hallway. There was no privacy, not even a thin curtain. I guessed it made it easier for the nurses to monitor the postsurgical patients, but still, my father was exposed—his decades of poor health and worse decisions were illuminated—on white sheets in a white hallway under white lights.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question. Who could be okay after such a thing? Yesterday, my father had walked into the hospital. Okay, he’d shuffled while balanced on two canes, but that was still called walking. A few hours ago, my father still had both of his feet. Yes, his feet and toes had been black with rot and disease but they’d still been, technically speaking, feet and toes. And, most important, those feet and toes had belonged to my father. But now they were gone, sliced off. Where were they? What did they do with the right foot and the toes from the left foot? Did they throw them in the incinerator? Were their ashes floating over the city?

  “Doctor, I’m cold,” my father said.

  “Dad, it’s me,” I said.

  “I know who are you. You’re my son.” But considering the blankness in my father’s eyes, I assumed he was just guessing at
my identity.

  “Dad, you’re in the hospital. You just had surgery.”

  “I know where I am. I’m cold.”

  “Do you want another blanket?” Another stupid question. Of course, he wanted another blanket. He probably wanted me to build a fucking campfire or drag in one of those giant propane heaters that NFL football teams used on the sidelines.

  I walked down the hallway—the recovery hallway—to the nurses’ station. There were three women nurses, two white and one black. Being Native American-Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Indian, I hoped my darker pigment would give me an edge with the black nurse, so I addressed her directly.

  “My father is cold,” I said. “Can I get another blanket?”

  The black nurse glanced up from her paperwork and regarded me. Her expression was neither compassionate nor callous.

  “How can I help you, sir?” she asked.

  “I’d like another blanket for my father. He’s cold.”

  “I’ll be with you in a moment, sir.”

  She looked back down at her paperwork. She made a few notes. Not knowing what else to do, I stood there and waited.

  “Sir,” the black nurse said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  She was irritated. I understood. After all, how many thousands of times had she been asked for an extra blanket? She was a nurse, an educated woman, not a damn housekeeper. And it was never really about an extra blanket, was it? No, when people asked for an extra blanket, they were asking for a time machine. And, yes, she knew she was a health care provider, and she knew she was supposed to be compassionate, but my father, an alcoholic, diabetic Indian with terminally damaged kidneys, had just endured an incredibly expensive surgery for what? So he could ride his motorized wheelchair to the bar and win bets by showing off his disfigured foot? I know she didn’t want to be cruel, but she believed there was a point when doctors should stop rescuing people from their own self-destructive impulses. And I couldn’t disagree with her but I could ask for the most basic of comforts, couldn’t I?