Ten Little Indians (16 page)

“What about your family?” asked William, because he didn’t know what else to ask and because he was thinking of his wife and daughter. “Weren’t they in danger? Wouldn’t Selassie want to hurt them?”

“I could only pray Selassie would leave them be. He had always been good to me, but he saw me as impulsive, so I hoped he would know my family had nothing to do with my flight. I was a coward for staying and a coward for leaving. But none of it mattered, because Selassie was overthrown a few weeks after I defected.”

“A coup?”

“Yes, the Derg deposed him, and they slaughtered all of their enemies and their enemies’ families. They suffocated Selassie with a pillow the next year. And now I could never return to Ethiopia because Selassie’s people would always want to kill me for my betrayal, and the Derg would always want to kill me for being Selassie’s soldier. Every night and day, I worry that any of them might harm my family. I want to go there and defend them. I want to bring them here. They can sleep on my floor! But even now, after democracy has almost come to Ethiopia, I cannot go back. There is too much history and pain, and I am too afraid.”

“How long has it been since you’ve talked to your family?”

“We write letters to each other, and sometimes we receive them. They sent me photos once, but they never arrived for me to see. And for two days, I waited by the telephone because they were going to call, but it never rang.”

Fekadu pulled the taxi to a slow stop at the airport curb. “We are here, sir,” he said. “United Airlines.”

William didn’t know how this ceremony was supposed to end. He felt small and powerless against the collected history. “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked.

“Sir, you must pay me thirty-eight dollars for this ride,” said Fekadu and laughed. “Plus a very good tip.”

“How much is good?”

“You see, sometimes I send cash to my family. I wrap it up and try to hide it inside the envelope. I know it gets stolen, but I hope some of it gets through to my family. I hope they buy themselves gifts from me. I hope.”

“You pray for this?”

“Yes, William, I pray for this. And I pray for your safety on your trip, and I pray for the safety of your wife and daughter while you are gone.”

“Pop the trunk, I’ll get my own bags,” said William as he gave sixty dollars to Fekadu, exited the taxi, took his luggage out of the trunk, and slammed it shut. Then William walked over to the passenger-side window, leaned in, and studied Fekadu’s face and the terrible scar on his neck.

“Where did you get that?” William asked.

Fekadu ran a finger along the old wound. “Ah,” he said. “You must think I got this flying in a war. But no, I got this in a taxicab wreck. William, I am a much better jet pilot than a car driver.”

Fekadu laughed loudly and joyously. William wondered how this poor man could be capable of such happiness, however temporary it was.

“Your stories,” said William. “I want to believe you.”

“Then believe me,” said Fekadu.

Unsure, afraid, William stepped back.

“Good-bye, William American,” Fekadu said and drove away.

Standing at curbside, William couldn’t breathe well. He wondered if he was dying. Of course he was dying, a flawed mortal dying day by day, but he felt like he might fall over from a heart attack or stroke right there on the sidewalk. He left his bags and ran inside the terminal. Let a luggage porter think his bags were dangerous! Let a security guard x-ray the bags and find mysterious shapes! Let a bomb-squad cowboy explode the bags as precaution! Let an airport manager shut down the airport and search every possible traveler! Let the FAA president order every airplane to land! Let the American skies be empty of everything with wings! Let the birds stop flying! Let the very air go still and cold! William didn’t care. He ran through the terminal, searching for an available pay phone, a landline, something true and connected to the ground, and he finally found one and dropped two quarters into the slot and dialed his home number, and it rang and rang and rang and rang, and William worried that his wife and daughter were harmed, were lying dead on the floor, but then Marie answered.

“Hello, William,” she said.

“I’m here,” he said.

D
URING THE SUMMER OF
1976, the city of Seattle was beginning to change from the barbarous seaport of loggers, sailors, and Indians it had always been into the progressive, computerized, and sanitized capital of all things Caucasian it would become. I was thirteen and pretty-skinny-beautiful, with eyelashes so black, long, and curly that grown women lost their minds and manners over me:

1. “Oh, why do boys always get the gorgeous eyelashes?”
   
2. “I’ll give you a million dollars for those eyelashes!”
   
3. “Hey, Sexy Eyes, why don’t you give me a call when you get legal.”
   
4. “Hello, Benjamin, my name is Mrs. Robinson.”
   
5. “Hey, let’s play Tonto and the Lone Ranger.”
   

My crazy aunt Bettina thought all of the female attention was going to make me gay, and though I loved a homoerotic circle jerk as much as the next curious teenage boy, I dreamed almost exclusively about girls and women.

Rules for Homoerotic Circle Jerks

1. Keep your hands to yourself.
   
2. You must open your eyes at least every thirty seconds, and you must keep them open at least thirty seconds at a time.
   
3. No making fun of larger or smaller penises.
   
4. Bring your own tissues for cleanup.
   
5. If you bring pornography, then you must share it.
   
6. You cannot fantasize about the girlfriends of the boys standing next to you, but you can fantasize about the girlfriends of every other boy in the circle.
   
7. You can fantasize about any of the boys in the circle jerk, but not if they are standing next to you.
   
8. An official circle jerk contains seven boys.
   
9. If fewer than seven boys want to jerk off together, they must stand in single file, and it shall be known as a firing line.
   
10. If more than seven boys want to jerk off together, it shall be called a Joint Session of Congress.
    

My head was filled with a disassociated and constantly running montage of vaginas and breasts; I was the Andy Warhol of self-imagined adolescent porn. And yes, even at thirteen years of age, I knew about Andy Warhol’s work and found it so completely of its time that I guessed his deconstructive painting of Campbell’s soup cans would eventually be used as a paid advertisement for Campbell’s soup.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: It was my mother who first advanced that particular anti-Warholian theory, and she might have read it first somewhere else. But she is a powerful Indian who reads art-theory books, so I listen to her, and I often agree with her criticism.

My mother was super smart, and I was smart by osmosis. But she was born smart on the Spokane Indian Reservation and studied her way into the University of Washington during a time when she was pretty much the only Indian on campus, aside from two Snohomish janitors and a Yakama cook at one of the dorms. It’s tough to be a smart girl anywhere, but it’s way tough on the rez.

Q: What’s the difference between an Indian reservation and a racist, sexist, homophobic, white-trash logging town populated entirely with the mutated children of married second cousins?

A: The Indians have braids.

If you think about it, my mother was as heroic as Thor Heyerdahl, Sir Edmund Hillary, John Glenn, or any of those white-boy explorers. My mother broke speed limits, climbed mountains, and sailed oceans nobody else had dreamed up. And she did it all by herself, with one hand holding a textbook and the other hand holding a squealing baby (
me!
) to her breast. Maybe I’m smart because my mother’s breast milk had little pieces of Albert Einstein and Madame Curie floating around in it. As for my father, he was so long gone that my mother and I called him Long Gone and told each other bedtime stories that always ended with him getting eaten by wild dogs.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: I greatly missed my father and only pretended to hate him as much as my mother did.

My mother and I lived in a two-bedroom rental house in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle. We were poor, but anybody can afford fruits and vegetables, and that’s what we ate. I wasn’t a vegetarian by choice; I was a vegetarian by economic circumstance.

On July 5 (I remember the exact day because I remember the acrid smell of leftover fireworks smoke), my mother and I were shopping in the local free-range, whole-wheat, lactose-intolerant co-op when she picked up a hand-stapled magazine and self-administered a parenting quiz:

1. Do you know the names of all of your child’s friends?
   
2. Do you give your child gender-neutral gifts?
   
3. When your child cries, what color are you thinking of?
   
4. Are you fully clothed, partially clothed, or nude when you breast-feed your baby?
   
5. What are you teaching your child about peace and justice?
   
6. Have you taught your child to play a musical instrument?
   
7. Do you heart-listen to your child?
   

Despite her roving and restless intelligence, my mother was the kind of person who believed the garbage she read in magazines. We all have our blind spots, I suppose. She was distrustful enough to write a master’s thesis titled “John F. Kennedy’s Murder: How Rich Men Tell One Lie for Each Dollar They’re Worth,” but she still believed in astrology. She was genuinely shocked and hurt when she caught another human being lying to her, which meant she lived in a constant state of painful surprise, but oh, she would violently punish those liars by screaming surrealistic curses:

1. “Your great-grandfather starred in silent porno movies!”
   
2. “Gravity was invented to keep you from realizing your dreams!”
   
3. “Every time you masturbate, you give birth to ten thousand mosquitoes!”
   
4. “I hope Hitler eats your dog in hell!”
   

So my mother was naive and vengeful, just like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, and about 99 percent of all the other famous world leaders you ever heard about. But she wasn’t famous; she was only my mother, and she so miserably failed the parenting quiz that she decided to become my best friend. She never asked my opinion of her parenting skills, but I would have told her this: “Dear Ma; you forgot my ninth birthday, and still to this day have not remembered you forgot it. I’ll probably be presented with a ninth-birthday card on my elderly and senile deathbed. But you’re also the woman who drove me to school during my entire scholastic career, all the way from White Rabbit’s Wonderful Preschool until I graduated from Garfield High School, because it’s pretty darn cute to ride the bus when you’re six years old, but you’re on the Loser Cruiser once you enter the teen years. As a mother, you suffered from a soap-opera style of amnesia (
Let’s deal with stressful events by pretending they never happened!
) but were critically aware of the Jane Austen-Dinner-Party-meets-Cannibal-Zombies-on-the-Moon social structures of public schools. I truly hated the goofy clothes you wore, which were all sorts of white-hippie-chick-porn-star-Jane-Fonda-in-
The Electric Horseman
trendy, but you did frame three of my baby outfits and hang them in the front hallway. So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary’s College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.”

But my mother never asked me what I thought of her, and she went crazy after she failed that parenting quiz, and attempted to spend every moment of her waking life with me. She took me to seven baseball games and fourteen poetry readings, and I found both pastimes remarkably similar:

1. Am I supposed to clap now?
   
2. Was that a strike?
   
3. Why is he scratching his nuts?
   

She took me to folk-music concerts and ballets. Once, during
Swan Lake,
a secondary ballerina took a wrong turn onstage and smashed into the prima ballerina, sending them both sprawling to the ground. Undaunted, the women jumped back up and resumed dancing, eliciting tremendous applause from the previously sedate crowd (as if they’d only then realized these women were serious athletes and had made a highlight-worthy recovery), but my mother wept.

“What’s wrong, Ma?” I asked.

“That poor woman,” she said. “Her career is over.”

“No, they’re okay, they’re both okay, look at them dance.”

“But the young one,” said my mother, weeping so profusely that people around us were getting uncomfortable. “She will never get to dance with the prima again. They’ll punish her. I know it. They’ll make fun of her. They’ll fire her, and she’ll quit dancing and regret it for the rest of her life.”

“I think you’re overreacting, Ma.”

“No, no,” she said, so loudly I’m sure the ballerinas heard her. “Don’t you see? Your whole life can be determined by one moment. You make one choice, one mistake, and that’s it. You’ve made the map you’ve got to follow for the rest of your life.”

“Ma, you’re making a scene.”

She was always making scenes. She yelled at mothers and fathers who publicly spanked their children (
Hey, Mussolini, how would you like me to do that to you?
), and commented loudly at any display of public rudeness:

1. “Oh, look at Prince Pushy of Monaco, cutting in line. Hey, Prince, do you keep your crown in your ass?”
   
2. “Oh, excuse me, excuse me, Ms. Moneybags, but I see that your party of eight left only a dollar tip for the waitress. I assume that was an honest mistake.”
   
3. “Okay, okay, everybody, listen up, we’re all waiting in line to get our driver’s licenses, but this man here, he’s cursing a lot, so he obviously needs his license more than anybody else in the history of the world. Can somebody please get him a special driver’s license, please, hurry.”
   

If she’d been a man and talked like that to strangers, she would have been punched four times a week. How does a self-proclaimed pacifist get herself into so many confrontations? I don’t know; I don’t understand her, not then or now. She’s a contradiction. She has always contained multitudes. But no matter how unpredictable she can be, she fought plenty of justified battles as well. When my elementary school principal, a ROTC pack leader named Wolff (not his real name!), wanted to control my exuberant nature by shoving sedatives down my throat on a highly regular basis, my mother stormed into his office with a bottle of lithium. She poured the pills onto Wolff’s desk, swallowed one dry, and then told Wolff it was his turn.