That night, I traveled back to Reardan to play in a basketball game. I scored seventeen first-quarter points in a frenzied, irrational burst as I dribbled end to end without sense, fired up impossible shots that went in, and shoved my opponents and teammates into walls and to the floor. At the end of the quarter, I was enraged and exhausted. And I screamed at my teammates. My coach benched me after my outburst and I became a spectator for the rest of the game.
Afterward, in the locker room, my coach said, “I’m sorry I sat you. But you were playing too hard. You were going to hurt yourself. Or somebody else.”
“It’s okay, Coach,” I said. “You were right.”
“You didn’t have to play tonight,” he said.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “This is my team now. These are my teammates.”
I was talking in sports metaphors. But I was also talking about my tribal allegiances. My brilliant sister had died drunk in a fire. I feared—I knew—that I would die violently like that if I ever returned to my rez. I would die in a fire. In a car wreck. In a brawl. By my own hand. At that moment, sitting in that white-school locker room with my white coach and white teammates, I knew I would never again fully be a part of my reservation. I knew I was going to be a nomad.
I decided to live.
Later, after the game, when I returned home to the rez, my mother was sedated and asleep in the back bedroom.
I stood in the doorway and listened to her breathe.
I mourned with her and for her. She’d lost her mother, brother, and daughter to the next world.
And I understood that she’d also lost me.
She didn’t cry out my name. She didn’t whisper it.
I was now a ghost in her world. She was already haunted by who I might have become. Awake, I wept. My mother, still asleep, reached her hand toward somebody only she could see.
I whispered, “I love you,” and walked, grief-drunk and afraid, into the rest of my life.
74.
Unsaved
AT REARDAN, I became something of a boarding school student. After late-night events, I would often stay over with friends rather than drive in the dark back to the reservation. I slept a few times in the high school locker room on piles of laundered towels. If my car was running and the weather was good, I might sleep in the backseat.
During winter, when the road between my reservation and Reardan was unnavigable, I would sometimes sleep on a couch in the basement of the Lutheran church.
Yeah, I was the Indian taking refuge with the Christians.
Rather ironic, enit?
And cinematic, too, in a Frank Capra dark-subtext sort of way.
But it wasn’t completely cinematic because, if it had been a movie, I would have kissed the Lutheran minister’s daughter—I would have made out with the preacher’s kid.
But I never did kiss her.
She’d already graduated high school and was off to college by the time I was sleeping on that Lutheran couch.
I never enjoyed the spiritually ironic privilege of kissing any preacher’s daughter.
But I did marry a Native American woman with a master’s in theology. So, you know, I have made babies with a Christian. Yep, some ironies can be tender sacraments that feel great in the dark. And in the light.
75.
Skin
I DON’T REMEMBER my first pimple. But I do remember, at age seventeen, when I stood at the bathroom mirror and counted forty-seven zits on my face.
Who knows how much body dysmorphia I was experiencing at that moment—I’ve never read a scientific study about the psychological effects of having extensive acne—but I do remember feeling freakish and ugly. I felt disfigured.
At age fifty, I still have to use a variety of acne-treatment soaps and moisturizers. There’s something poetic about one of my crow’s-feet wrinkles reaching toward a zit as if it were a raspberry dropped on a brown dirt road.
My face doesn’t appear to be acne-scarred, not at first or second glance. My brown skin seems to camouflage a lot of the damage. But in certain lights and at certain angles, and especially in black-and-white photos, my acne scars become more evident.
Or maybe they don’t. Maybe I am hyperaware of them. After reading early drafts of this chapter, many friends told me that they’d never noticed my scars. So do I still have the scars? Am I seeing something that is not there? Maybe I have never stopped being that poor Indian teenager, staring into the mirror at his ravaged face.
I am especially self-conscious of the acne scars on my back.
A decade ago, my younger son saw my back as I was changing my shirt in the laundry room. I hadn’t realized he was there. He later asked his mother, my wife, if my back had been burned.
“No,” my wife said. “Your father had really bad acne. And those are his scars.”
“Why didn’t he use medicine?” my son asked.
“Your dad was too poor to get good health care,” my wife said. “Nobody ever gave him the right medicine.”
“Is that why Dad gets after us about washing our faces?” my son asked.
“Yes,” she said.
It’s true. I have been diligent about my sons’ complexions. I’ve been paranoid. Thank God they have both inherited their mother’s clear and lovely skin. But I started buying my sons the most scientifically effective acne soap and lotions as soon as they entered puberty.
For me, “Wash your face” is another way to say “I love you.”
My mother and father had clear skin. My siblings all have clear skin. I don’t know why I was the only one marked by acne. But sometimes I wonder if I was scarred by evil forces, or if I am the evil one who was scarred as a warning to others. Well, I don’t actually believe in that kind of superstitious bullshit.
And yet. And yet.
When I was in sixth grade on the reservation, I witnessed an Indian girl getting bullied by an Indian boy. He was a tall and handsome star athlete from one of the more socially powerful families on the reservation. She was a member of a powwow family, not ostracized but not popular. Her family were all dancers, singers, drummers, and stick-game players. They were, to use a Native idiom, “traditional.” And they were also rumored to possess suumesh, a Salish word that translates most simply as “magic,” but is best understood by non-Salish people as the equivalent of the Force in Star Wars mythology.
So, yes, that bullied girl was a Spokane Indian Jedi. Or maybe, given her age, she was only a Padawan, a Jedi apprentice, a beginner at suumesh.
But I wasn’t thinking about magic when I witnessed that popular kid stand over that traditional girl’s desk and whisper, “You’re ugly.”
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“You’re the ugliest girl in the whole school,” he whispered.
“Shut up,” she said.
Tears welled in her eyes. She was trying not to cry. There was nothing worse than crying. If you cried on my reservation, then even your best friends would make fun of you.
“You are the ugliest girl on the whole rez,” he whispered.
She wept. Tears rolled down her face and dropped onto her desk. Other Indians laughed at her. I’d like to say I didn’t laugh at her, but I don’t remember. I was among the most bullied kids, and defending other bullied kids only earned you another beating. So I probably laughed at her.
“You are the ugliest Indian girl in the world,” he whispered.
That was all she could endure. Only twelve years old, she rose from her desk, pointed at that bully, and said, “I curse you. I curse you. I curse you. You are going to be the ugly one. You are always going to be the ugly one.”
Almost everybody laughed. But she scared the shit out of me. Her little-girl voice had sounded so adult, so old and scratchy, so grandmotherly.
Or maybe I only imagined it sounded like that.
A week later, the bully, so handsome and clean, came to school with a zit on his face. Within a month, his face was more ravaged by acne than even mine would be later. He wo
uld be acne-scarred until he died of cancer, in his late thirties.
That girl had cursed him. And, well, fuck me, it seemed like the curse was real. The curse had worked.
Of course, that popular kid had just entered his teen years—the age of acne—and he had to suffer through the same shitty health care as the rest of us. So there are logical, economic, and banal reasons for the sudden onset of his acne.
And yet. And yet.
My skin started to go bad when I left the reservation to attend the farm-town high school twenty-two miles away. So I have often wondered, irrationally, if I had been cursed for leaving my people. I wondered if I was the victim of dark suumesh.
It’s more bullshit, right? I was just another kid with acne, yes? And, okay, my acne was more extensive and long-lasting than most other people’s acne. But that is all scientifically explainable, isn’t it? After all, I was a poor Indian teenager who had left his tribe for a town full of white strangers so HORMONES + STRESS + POOR HEALTH CARE = HORRIFIC ACNE.
When I was a kid, I once asked my mother if suumesh was real. And she said, “It’s real if you believe it’s real.” As an adult, I once asked my mother why she didn’t get me better health care for my skin. And she said, “I didn’t think there was anything that could be done.”
If my mother were still alive, I think I would ask her if there was ever a time when she felt powerful.
As for me? Well, my life is miraculous. I tell stories for a living. How amazing is that? As a storyteller, I sometimes feel like the most traditional kind of Indian. And, once in a great while, I feel like I possess a shard of that good suumesh.
But I have rarely allowed anybody to touch the most sensitive skin on my back. I’ve ordered massage and physical therapists to avoid my scars. I have never allowed myself to be that vulnerable, not even to my wife of twenty-four years.
I don’t believe that I was cursed by an enemy—I don’t actually believe in suumesh—but I still wouldn’t be shocked to learn that I’ve been continually cursing myself for leaving my reservation, for fleeing from my tribe, for abandoning the place where my mother was born and where she died.
So, yes, sometimes, I stand at my mirror and I strain my neck and turn my head so I can see the full of my back. And, yes, I still feel disfigured.
Look at those scars, the mirror whispers.
Look at those scars.
Look at those scars.
That is the skin of the boy who changed his destiny.
76.
Missionary Position
IN MY RURAL conservative Christian public high school, twenty-two miles from my reservation, I was the only Indian except for the mascot.
That’s the one-line joke about my racial isolation.
Truthfully, by the time I graduated, I was one of five Indians in that high school. Two of them were my sisters.
Despite this racial isolation, I was, at various times, the captain of the basketball team, president of the Future Farmers of America, and prom royalty.
During my sophomore year, as I shared a table at the local pizza place with five white friends, we watched a drunk and disheveled Indian stagger inside and slump at the bar. He yelled unintelligibly, then sang and finger-drummed a powwow rhythm on the bar top. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t a member of my small tribe. But I was deeply embarrassed. We were the only Indians in the place. We were connected by race and culture if not by tribe and blood.
My white friends were visibly distressed by that loud singer and drummer. One of my friends, whom I shall call Tara, leaned forward and whispered, “I hate Indians.”
My four other white friends gasped, but it took Tara a few moments to remember that she was sitting beside me, her Indian friend. She burst into tears and spent the rest of the night apologizing.
“It’s okay,” I kept saying. But it wasn’t. I was hurt, ashamed, and angry.
If I’d had parents I trusted, I might have hurried home and shared that experience with them. I might have learned about all of the times they’d dealt with overt and covert racism. They might have taught me strategies for how to emotionally and physically deal with racism. But I didn’t have parents like that. I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that my father and mother would have offered useful advice to me. I had to live as an Indian in the anti-Indian world without proper training. I had to teach myself how to practice racial self-defense, and I made some profound, amateurish mistakes.
Tara and I eventually dated for nearly three years. We talked about marriage. We lived together. She was always kind. I gave her a promise ring that I bought for twenty dollars in a pawnshop. When we broke up for the last time, she gave me back that promise ring. And I sold it for ten dollars back to that pawnshop.
That pawnshop is closed now.
What happens to the inventory of a closing pawnshop?
I would guess it is sold to another pawnshop.
A pawnshop buys a pawnshop.
I imagine that a poor man—as poor or poorer than I was—eventually bought that promise ring and gave it to the woman he loved.
That promise ring, small and lovely and inexpensive, is probably now buried in the jewelry box of that woman, who received a better ring when her husband could afford it later in their life together. But she keeps that first ring as a reminder of who she used to be.
I was once an Indian boy who was once in love with a white girl who once hated Indians.
This is a love story, I think.
77.
Shush
DURING HIGH SCHOOL, my white girlfriend’s mother warned her to never go to the reservation with me.
“Why not?” I asked my girlfriend.
“My mom said that Indians are too angry.”
Laughing at the casual racism, I later told my mother what my girlfriend had said.
“What your girlfriend’s mother doesn’t know,” my mother said, “is that you’re the Indian around here who has the worst temper.”
Because of my childhood hydrocephalus and resultant brain surgery and seven years of seizures, petit and grand, along with addiction to several painkillers and sedatives, I was prone to blackout rages where somebody bigger had to sit on me to keep me from running through walls.
I once spent hours repeatedly crashing into a smallish pine tree until it broke and fell.
That was me, the lumberjack of irrational anger, the ax of self-destructive wounding, the sharp blade of get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here.
That white girlfriend never did visit my reservation home.
But I married a Native American woman, a powerful Hidatsa, who’d spent time on my reservation before I met her.
“Before I went to your rez,” my wife said, “all the Indians in Spokane—all the Indians who weren’t Spokane—said you Spokanes were mean.”
“And?” I asked.
“You Spokanes are mean,” my wife said. “Not with fists. But with words. I never met Indians so good at teasing each other—at burning people with insults.”
“What about me?” I asked. “Am I mean?”
“You aren’t mean to me with words,” she said. “You’re mean to me with your silences.”
“Wow,” I said, feeling seen. “You know, there was a three-year period in college when my mother and I didn’t say a word to each other, even if we were in the same room. Even if we were in the same car.”
“Why did you guys stop talking?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“What made you start talking again?”
“I don’t remember that either.”
“You should ask your mom,” my wife said. “Maybe she remembers.”
“Asking my mom about a fight,” I said, “is like asking my mom to fight again. We probably stopped talking to each other because I reminded her of some other time when we weren’t talking to each other.”
“You’re scared of your mother, aren’t you?” my wife asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“So am I,
” my wife said.
And we laughed.
78.
Harvest
THE DAY AFTER my big sister’s burial on the reservation—after my mother had collapsed in grief five or six times—I returned to my farm-town school. The white kids, my friends and fellow eighth-graders, shook my hand, patted me on the back, said awkward and graceful things. They were reticent in the presence of grief. They were polite about my pain. I didn’t understand it. I’d been raised by a mother who was so emotionally expansive. She often wildly expressed the wrong emotion, but at least she was always emotive. I’d seen my drunken father weeping and incoherently singing love songs while pissing his pants. So, yeah, I had no relationship with reticence.
A year after my sister’s death, one of my white classmates died in a car wreck. His name was Donny Piper. He was a farm kid who wore western shirts and cowboy boots every day. A constant smiler, he had a locker always filled with cans of Pepsi and bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos. And he generously shared his junk food. On certain days, when there’d been no money for breakfast or lunch, Donny’s soda and chips were my only meal. Nobody at Reardan knew I was that poor. I never let any of them know when I was hungry. Though I qualified for free lunch, I never went to the cafeteria. I worried that being poor would negatively affect my social standing. Poverty kids are never popular kids, right?
My entire class, all fifty of us, went to Donny’s funeral. I sat in a back pew and cried for a while. I liked Donny. I would miss him. He died so young. And because I’d already been to a few dozen wakes and funerals, it felt as if all of the separate grief had become one ever-growing grief, as if each grief was worse than the previous grief because of exponential math. So it felt like my grief for Donny was the same size as all the rest of my grief combined, plus one. But I stopped crying when I noticed that very few people were being openly emotional. I’d never seen that many stoic people at a funeral. I’d never experienced a silent and polite funeral. My tribe doesn’t bury our dead that way. We wail, weep, and tell dirty jokes at graveside.