You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

  I wonder if she ever considered befriending me. I wonder if I would have accepted and trusted her friendship.

  Those questions are hypothetical, of course, because my bully could not help herself. She could not be happy in a world where she was not allowed to belittle me.

  So, one morning, as I walked past her in the hallway, as she huddled with a group of her new friends, she turned my name into an insult: “Hey, Spermin’! Hey, Spermin’!”

  She laughed. I stopped and stared at her. She smiled at me, as if she had won something. In Wellpinit, that behavior would have been acceptable. In Reardan, it was not.

  My sister told me later that she’d seen all of that happen.

  “She did that to you,” my sister said. “And I knew it was over for her.”

  Over the next few hours, I whispered a few things to a few friends. Those whispered things were whispered to others. And those whispers continued to be whispered.

  Within a few days, my sister ran up to me in the hallway and told me she had just seen my bully eating all by herself at a big table in the lunchroom.

  “She looked so sad,” my sister said.

  A few days after that, my bully had transferred back to the school on the reservation.

  It was a decisive victory.

  I had saved myself.

  Do I feel good about how I exiled my bully?

  Yes, I feel great.

  Do I also feel bad about how I exiled my bully?

  More than three decades later, I still feel guilty. But I know it was necessary. I know it was self-defense. I know it was justifiable. But it also revealed to me how willing I was to socially torture another person.

  You can call me vindictive, and I will not disagree.

  I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.

  I called my sister and asked her what else she remembered about my battle with my bully.

  “I want to know if you remember something I don’t,” I said.

  “She was mad at me for years,” my sister said. “And I had nothing to do with it. I was an innocent bystander.”

  “You’ve never been innocent.”

  My sister laughed. But she was laughing too hard for that small joke.

  “What? What?” I asked.

  “I bet if you stayed on the rez you would’ve married her.”

  “Fuck that!” I said, and laughed.

  But it’s not an inconceivable thought. My bully ended up leaving the rez school again and graduated from a different but mostly white high school. She graduated from college. She’s always been ambitious, talented, and highly opinionated. She hasn’t lived on the reservation for years but remains connected through family, friends, culture, and business. She also has plenty of enemies on the rez. My bully and I are the same kind of Spokane Indians.

  I am laughing as I write this because I realize now, after all of these years, that my bully had followed me to Reardan. She had attempted to use my escape route. She had emulated me.

  And I laugh even harder because I am quite sure she would absolutely deny that.

  And now I am laughing at the thought that maybe she and I would have gone to the prom together. Or, heck, since it was a farm town, maybe she and I would have gone to the harvest ball.

  Two Spokane Indians slow-dancing while surrounded by white kids. And hay bales festooned with blue ribbons. While Hank Williams, Jr., or Spandau Ballet played a love ballad.

  That’s the happy ending of the John Hughes movie about Indians, enit?

  I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.

  But I have to keep asking: If I had stayed on the reservation, then whom do I think I would have married?

  I bet I would have fallen in love with a white schoolteacher—one of those crusading liberals who come to the rez hoping to save Indians. Most of those teachers last for only a year or two. Saving Indians is a tough job with long hours and terrible pay. But some of those white teachers stay for their entire lives.

  During my travels to many reservations over the last twenty-five years, I have met a few white teachers who fell in love with and married Indian people.

  I once met a TV news reporter, a white woman, who fell in love with an Indian man as she was interviewing him.

  “On the rez, we were standing in a wild grass field overlooking the river valley,” the woman said to me. “I was filing a report about environmental efforts on the reservation. And I just kept being distracted by the beauty of the landscape. And I looked at this Indian man. And he was so beautiful, too. And he and that landscape belonged together, you know? And I thought, ‘Hey, I want some of that action!’ And I have been getting that action for twenty years.”

  During high school and college, I fell deeply in love with two women. Both white. Marriage was discussed.

  They both broke up with me.

  And shortly after breaking up with me, they each met the white man they would marry. They are both still married.

  I have always wished them well.

  I remember them with affection and respect.

  I suppose, in many ways, one never stops loving the people they loved during their youth.

  Or hating the people they hated.

  My bully reentered my life in 2005 or 2006. Maybe it was 2007. Or 2003. I was giving a reading at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane. As always, I had reserved a section of seats for my mother, siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews.

  My siblings and mother took their seats early in the bookstore. But I was still in my hotel room getting ready. So my sister had to tell me what happened before I arrived.

  “So we’re sitting there,” my sister said. “And she [the bully] and two other Spokane Indian women [who had never liked me either] come striding in and just took seats in the reserved section.”

  “Maybe they thought the reserved section was reserved for reservation Indians who had made a reservation,” I said.

  “Oh,” my sister said. “That’s a dumb joke. Anyways, they sat in our section and wouldn’t even look at us. They looked all mad in the face.”

  I immediately noticed my bully when I walked into the bookstore. I don’t even remember the two other Spokane Indian women who’d accompanied her. It was the only the second time I’d seen her since I’d exiled her from Reardan more than twenty years earlier.

  I’d first seen her in the reservation trading post during the summer after I’d exiled her. I spotted her and tried to dodge behind a shelf. But she saw me and rushed at me, cursing. I don’t remember exactly what she said. But she was furious at me. She knew that I had exiled her. She hated me for it.

  I was sheepish, defiant, amused, and angry.

  I don’t remember what I said.

  I wish I would have said, “I see that I hurt you. Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt me over the years?”

  But I imagine I instead offered her an empty apology, and I assume she rejected it.

  So, now, more than a decade after that encounter, my bully was sitting in the front row at my reading. I wasn’t even remotely the Indian boy she knew in Reardan or Wellpinit. I had become the kind of Indian man who can talk glorious shit to talk-show hosts and U.S. presidents on national television.

  But, damn it, my bully still made me nervous. She was still smart and beautiful. She was still intimidating.

  I heard “Junior High Honky” echoing inside my always-fragile head.

  I performed my poems and stories. I improvised stories and jokes. I interacted with the audience.

  And I watched my bully take notes the entire time.

  Battle plans, I assumed.

  And I thought, “Holy shit! She is going to verbally challenge me in front of four hundred of my most ardent fans—in front of my hometown crowd. Is she really this brave and stupid? Doe
sn’t she know how good I am onstage? Can’t she see how I would win any war of insults against her?”

  I have to admit that I was absolutely overjoyed at the thought of the impending confrontation.

  And then I looked at my mother. At my sisters. At my nieces. At my female cousins. I looked at those Spokane Indians—those Native American women—and I thought about how much sorrow and pain they’d endured in their lives, how Native women everywhere are so targeted for violence by tribal and American society.

  I love those Native women I call my family and friends.

  But I don’t love my bully. Not even a little bit.

  However, I realized I had no need to win some imaginary fight with her. I had no desire to hurt her feelings. I didn’t want to walk the circle of animosity anymore. I wasn’t going to forgive her. I’m not a sap. She would have to actually apologize in order for me to think about forgiving her. But, stop, stop, stop, I wanted that shit to stop.

  So when she raised her hand, I politely called on her three separate times and answered questions about tribal responsibility, alcoholism, and negative stereotypes of Native Americans.

  I declared a truce with her, at least within myself. Or maybe it’s only a partial truce because a half-truce is really just a surrender, right?

  In any case, I hope there is a future powwow when she, an elderly Spokane Indian woman, asks me, an elderly Spokane Indian man, for an owl dance.

  “Yes, of course,” I will say.

  It won’t be romantic. It won’t be all that friendly. But it will be a clumsy acknowledgment of our lifelong bond, however frayed.

  On a Saturday morning in a hotel room in Bellingham—in an Oxford Suites that had three-dimensional art in the bathroom that spelled WASH in huge wooden capital letters—I said to my wife, “I am going to get naked and lie facedown on the bed. And I want you to look at my back. I want you to study my back. I want you to study my scars. I want you to tell me what they look like. I want you to touch the scars. I want you to trace their outlines with your fingertips. I want to feel you feeling my scars.”

  Diane did as she was asked. She touched the small scars. Ran her fingertips along the longer scars.

  “What do they look like?” I asked.

  “They’re lighter than they used to be.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Take some pictures with your phone and e-mail them to me. I will look at them later.”

  I thought it might take me weeks to look at the photos of my scarred back. Maybe months. Maybe I would never look at them.

  So I was surprised to find myself downloading those photos onto my iPad only an hour later.

  Diane was driving us home to Seattle. She almost always wants to drive, and I almost always want to sit in the passenger seat and daydream.

  “Okay,” I said. “I am looking at them now.”

  I laughed at how pale my back had become. I’ve lived in sunless Seattle for two decades. I’m an introverted writer who’d rather be inside reading or writing. And I haven’t played outdoor shirts-and-skins pickup basketball in a long time.

  Looking at my pale back, I realized that it had been at least fifteen years since I had been topless in direct sunlight.

  So my skin had grown pale. Had grown from brown to slightly tan.

  But my acne scars had also grown pale.

  My skin and my scars were now almost the same color.

  “You can’t really see my scars all that much anymore,” I said.

  “Only if you look really close,” Diane said. “Only if you’re looking for them.”

  “I don’t look burned anymore,” I said.

  “You’re kind of mottled,” Diane said. “Like a feather.”

  My wife and I traveled toward our home, toward our waiting sons. I closed my eyes and dreamed that I was entirely made of feathers. I dreamed I could hover like one feather, like a man made of feathers. And then I dreamed that each of my scars was a bird. And then I flew.

  160.

  Flight Hours

  That bird, small and brown, wrecked

  Against our kitchen window

  And crashed dead to our deck.

  “Avian suicide,” I said

  And walked out to retrieve

  Its broken-feathered body—

  And then I thought of my mother’s coffin being carried to the grave by her pallbearers. And realized that I would be the bird’s pallbearer. And that realization made me feel responsible for the bird, as if its death needed to matter, as if it weren’t just one more member of an essentially endless species. So I sat beside that dead bird and improvise-hummed an honor song—

  And startled when that bird lifted

  Its head as if my song were a gift

  That brought it back to life.

  Of course, I did not resurrect

  That bird. It had knocked

  Itself out against our window

  And was now regaining

  Consciousness. But had it broken

  Something? Maybe a wing?

  Would it be able to fly?

  Perhaps I’d have to watch it

  Simply and slowly die—

  And I knew that I shouldn’t let the bird suffer. But I didn’t know if I could pick it up and snap its neck. And as I imagined it struggling against my fingers, I knew I wasn’t cruel enough to smother it. So what to do? How long would it take to die? Minutes or hours? A day? And what would happen to the defenseless bird if I left it alone on our deck? It would be easy prey for all of the neighborhood predators—insects, rodents, other birds, and all of the mass-murdering house cats. I couldn’t stand the thought of this poor bird being eaten alive while it was potentially paralyzed. So, yes, I was a weak-ass moralist unable to kill the bird and unsure if I had the patience to stand guard as it died. Then, as I pondered, the bird lifted a wing—

  Ah, such a brave bird, reaching

  Toward the sky, I suppose.

  Or toward its God. I don’t know

  How birds die. But this bird

  Shook that wing, shook

  That wing, and then it raised

  Its other wing and shook it, too.

  Oh, I praised that bird

  As it shook and shook and shook

  Its wings, alternately

  And simultaneously.

  And then that little bird stood—

  I wasn’t home on the reservation when my mother died. My wife, sons, and I had visited her on Father’s Day, almost two weeks before her death, and we’d said our good-byes. During our mother’s final days and hours, my sisters and niece gently tried to get me to return. But I did not. I had thanked my mother for my life. I had told her that I loved her. Those weren’t lies. And they seemed to give me enough closure to survive. I don’t feel guilty about not being with my mother when she died. Or maybe I feel the proper amount of guilt. Or maybe I will feel more guilt as time passes. I don’t know. But I certainly feel terrible that I hurt my sisters and niece. And yet, I’d also known that many other people would come to help my sisters and niece. When my mother died, there were at least ten cousins and friends in the room. My mother was surrounded by her most beloved ones. Everybody except me—

  I applauded when that proud bird

  Climbed to its feet and shook,

  Shook, shook, shook, shook,

  And shook its entire body.

  Was it seizing? Or, wait, shit,

  Were those its death throes?

  No, no, I didn’t think so

  Because the bird walked slow

  Circles around the deck,

  Little oval miracles that became

  Larger as the minutes passed.

  And as it paced, the bird continued

  To shake and shake and shake

  Its head, wings, body, and feet,

  But I wasn’t sure why,

  And then it walked to the edge

  Of our deck, paused,

  And then lifted into flight,

  Around the corner

  Of o
ur house and then winged

  Its way out of my life—

  A few weeks after our mother’s funeral, and a few days after my adventure with the bird, I sat with my therapist and told her about the little creature’s pacing and shaking. “I don’t know if I ever told you,” my therapist said. “But I’m a birder. I love birds. And when they hit a window like that, or get hurt in any significant way, they have this ritual. They shake off the pain. They shake off the trauma. And they walk in circles to reconnect their brain and body and soul. When your bird was walking and shaking, it was remembering and relearning how to be a bird.” Oh, wow. I couldn’t say much after that intense revelation, but my therapist continued. “We humans often lose touch with our bodies,” she said. “We forget that we can also shake away our pain and trauma.” It seemed so simple. I openly doubted that it could be true—

  But, that night, I stood on our deck

  In the same place where that bird

  Had fallen, arose, walked, shook,

  And flew. And I performed

  That ritual, too. I shook my arms,

  Legs, head, and body. I paced

  In small circles that grew larger

  By the minute. I reached

  Toward every other constellation.

  I reached toward my sisters,

  Niece, and brothers. I reached

  Toward the memory of my mother.

  And as I continued to shake, I felt

  A sparrow-sized pain rise

  From my body and—wait, wait, wait.

  Listen. I don’t know how or when

  My grieving will end, but I’m always

  Relearning how to be human again.