Ten Little Indians (21 page)

“You told me you had a dentist appointment,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I lied to you directly. I never wanted to do that. I knew I was lying to you indirectly, but I hated to look you in the eyes and lie to you. I hated it.”

“The Westin is a decent hotel,” I said. Jesus, I sounded like a travel agent.

“The second time was in his car. We parked down on Lake Washington. You were down in Tacoma, covering the football championships.”

“I called home that night,” I said. “Sara was watching the kids. She said you had an emergency at the shop. The espresso maker was overheating.”

“She didn’t know I was lying. She thought I was at the shop.”

Once or twice a month, I ran the path alongside Lake Washington. I knew I would never run it again. How can I survive this? I thought. How many more of my routines will I have to change? Again I tried to take my wife’s hand. This time she let me. We interlaced our fingers. A small moment of intimacy, but enough to keep me from running out of the room and house and fleeing down the street.

“The third time was in his apartment,” she said. “In his bed. Lunchtime. I fell asleep with him. I hated that. That’s why I ended it. Falling asleep with him felt like the worst thing I could do. I never felt evil until I fell asleep with him.”

She leaned over and kissed my forehead. I felt her heat. I didn’t want to feel her heat. I didn’t want to smell her scent. I didn’t want to taste her. And it felt like time squared and cubed and then exploded exponentially. Days and months and years passed before I would find enough stupid courage to ask my third question.

“What did you do with him?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, into which parts of you did he put it?”

She flinched so painfully that I might as well have punched her in her chest. I was briefly happy about that.

“Do you really want to know that?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She stood and walked away from me. I assume she was afraid I might really punch her.

“We,” she said. “He—I mean, we—did everything.”

“Say it exactly.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You have to. It’s part of the deal.”

“I can’t. It hurts too much.”

“You don’t get to feel as much pain as me. Now say it. Tell me exactly.”

She closed her eyes and moaned like some tortured animal, like she was the first animal feeling the first pain. I heard that sound again when she buried her mother and, thirteen months later, her father.

“Tell me,” I said. “Exactly.”

She couldn’t speak. Instead, she pointed at her mouth, her vagina, and her ass. She looked like a pornographic mime. I started laughing. I lay down on the couch and laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. She stared at me like I was crazy. Then she started laughing with me. Softly at first, but soon she had to sit down laughing on the floor so she wouldn’t fall down laughing on the floor. She crawled across the floor and climbed onto the couch with me. We held each other and laughed. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. We held each other in the silence.

“If you still love me,” she said, “please, please, build me a time machine.”

She sounded like a little girl talking to her father. I didn’t know what to say. But we lay there together for hours until the kids came home from school and surprised us.

“Mommy and Daddy were doing it!” the four of them chanted and danced around the living room. “Mommy and Daddy were doing it!”

Sharon and I danced with our children. We danced the family dance, three quick spins, two hops, and a scream at the ceiling, and then Sharon and I made dinner, and we ate with our kids and gossiped about their school days and played
Chutes and Ladders
and watched
The Lion King
and made them brush their teeth and wash their faces and forced them into their pajamas and pushed them down the hallways into their beds and read them
Curious George
and
Go, Dog, Go!
and turned off the lights and told them good night and gave them our love, and we sat in the kitchen across from each other and drank coffee and added up our wins and our losses and decided to stay married.

It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” So Sharon and I formally rebuilt our marriage. And it was blue-collar work, exhausting and painful. We didn’t argue more often than before, but we did live with longer and greater silences. There were times when both of us wanted to quit, but we always found the strength to get up in the morning and go back to the job. And then, one winter night two years after her confession, after eating a lovely dinner at a waterfront restaurant and slow-dancing in the parking lot while a small group of tourists cheered for us, she read a book in bed while I stood at our bedroom window and stared out into the dark. We were comfortable in the silence. A day or week or month or year before, I would have felt the need to end such a wonderful evening by making love to her, by proving I could share our bed and her body with ghosts. But I felt no such need that night, and I realized we’d completed the rebuilding project, we’d constructed a brand-new marriage, a new home, that sat next to the old marriage and its dusty and shuttered house. Standing at the window, I could almost see our old house out there in the dark, and I missed it. I often thought of it as we continued with our lives.

Suddenly, Sharon and I were forty. For my birthday that year, she and the kids all pitched in together and gave me a T-shirt that read
LOST CAT
on the front and
DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM?
on the back.

I laughed and wore that shirt as pajamas. For two years, Sharon fell asleep next to me wearing that shirt.

“Oh, Lord,” I said to Sharon on the day I finally tossed the ragged T-shirt into the trash. “With every new day comes a new monument to our love and pain.”

“Who wrote that?” she asked.

“I did.”

“It’s free verse,” she said. “I hate free verse.”

We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread, our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library. Whitman in the pantry! The Brontë sisters in the television room! Hardy on the front porch! Dickinson in the laundry room! We kept a battered copy of
Native Son
in the downstairs bathroom so our guests would have something valuable to read!

How do you measure a marriage? Three of our children still lived in Seattle and taught high school English, history, and Spanish respectively, while the fourth managed a homeless shelter in Portland, Oregon. Maybe Sharon and I had never loved each other well enough, but our kids were smart and talented and sober. They made less money than we did, as we made less than our parents did. We were going the wrong way on the social-class map! How glorious!

Every Sunday night, we all gathered for dinner (Joshua drove up from Portland with his partner, Aaron, and their son) and told one another the best stories of our weeks. We needed those small ceremonies. Our contentment was always running only slightly ahead of our dissatisfaction.

Was it enough? I don’t know. But we knew enough not to ask ourselves too often. We knew to ask ourselves such questions during daylight hours. We fought hard for our happiness, and sometimes we won. Over the years, we won often enough to develop a strong taste for winning.

And then suddenly and mortally, Sharon and I were sixty-six years old.

On her birthday that year, surrounded by her husband, daughters, sons, and six grandkids, Sharon blew out the candles on her cake, closed her eyes, and made some secret wish.

One year later, after chemotherapy, radiation, organic food, acupuncture, and tribal shaman, Sharon lay on her deathbed in Sacred Hope Hospital. Our children had left their children to gather around Sharon, and it was good-bye Rachael! Good-bye Sarah! Good-bye Francis! Good-bye Joshua! She asked our children to give us some privacy. They cried and hugged her and left us alone.

“I’m going to die soon,” Sharon said.

“I know,” I said.

“I’m okay with it.”

“I’m not. Because I love you so much,” I said, “I would fistfight Time to win back your youth.”

“You’re a liar,” she said and smiled, too tired to laugh.

“I lied to you once,” I said. “But I haven’t lied to you since.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” I said.

O
NE DAY YOU HAVE
a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.

I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a one-hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out within two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs for many years, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy. Of course, “crazy” is not the official definition of my mental problem, but I don’t think “asocial disorder” fits it, either, because that makes me sound like I’m a serial killer or something. I’ve never hurt another human being, or at least not physically. I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, at that, because I’ve never abandoned one woman for another. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. And I’ve been disappearing ever since. But I’m not going to tell you any more about my brain or my soul.

I’ve been homeless for six years. If there’s such a thing as being an effective homeless man, I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use their bathrooms. I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden in the back of the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of, but it means a lot to me, being truthworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.

Probably none of this interests you. I probably don’t interest you much. Homeless Indians are everywhere in Seattle. We’re common and boring, and you walk right on by us, with maybe a look of anger or disgust or even sadness at the terrible fate of the noble savage. But we have dreams and families. I’m friends with a homeless Plains Indian man whose son is the editor of a big-time newspaper back east. That’s his story, but we Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmakers, so maybe that Plains Indian hobo is a plain old everyday Indian. I’m kind of suspicious of him, because he describes himself only as Plains Indian, a generic term, and not by a specific tribe. When I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me exactly what he is, he said, “Do any of us know exactly what we are?” Yeah, great, a philosophizing Indian. “Hey,” I said, “you got to have a home to be that homely.” He laughed and flipped me the eagle and walked away. But you probably want to know more about the story I’m really trying to tell you.

I wander the streets with a regular crew, my teammates, my defenders, and my posse. It’s Rose of Sharon, Junior, and me. We matter to one another if we don’t matter to anybody else. Rose of Sharon is a big woman, about seven feet tall if you’re measuring overall effect, and about five feet tall if you’re talking about the physical. She’s a Yakama Indian of the Wishram variety. Junior is a Colville, but there are about 199 tribes that make up the Colville, so he could be anything. He’s good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement. He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting around them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian, and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian. I am living proof of the horrible damage that colonialism has done to us Skins. But I’m not going to let you know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways. I’m a strong man, and I know that silence is the best way of dealing with white folks.

This whole story started at lunchtime, when Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I were panning the handle down at Pike Place Market. After about two hours of negotiating, we earned five dollars, good enough for a bottle of fortified courage from the most beautiful 7-Eleven in the world. So we headed over that way, feeling like warrior drunks, and we walked past this pawnshop I’d never noticed before. And that was strange, because we Indians have built-in pawnshop radar. But the strangest thing was the old powwow-dance regalia I saw hanging in the window.

“That’s my grandmother’s regalia,” I said to Rose of Sharon and Junior.

“How do you know for sure?” Junior asked.

I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever. I’d seen only photographs of my grandmother dancing in it. And that was before somebody stole it from her fifty years ago. But it sure looked like my memory of it, and it had all the same colors of feathers and beads that my family always sewed into their powwow regalia.

“There’s only one way to know for sure,” I said.

So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the old white man working behind the counter.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“That’s my grandmother’s powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Somebody stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been looking for it ever since.”

The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops are filled with liars.