The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (16 page)

Uncle Moses stood, put his hands on his hips, arched his back. More and more, he heard his spine playing stickgame through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years. He looked at the position of the sun to determine the time, checked his watch to be sure, and looked across the field for the children who would soon come.

The Indian children would come with half-braids, curiosity endless and essential. The children would come from throwing stones into water, from basketball and basketry, from the arms of their mothers and fathers, from the very beginning. This was the generation of HUD house, of car wreck and cancer, of commodity cheese and beef. These were the children who carried dreams in the back pockets of their blue jeans, pulled them out easily, traded back and forth.

“Dreams like baseball cards,” Uncle Moses said to himself, smiled hard when he saw the first child running across the field. It was Arnold, of course, pale-skinned boy who was always teased by the other children.

Arnold ran slowly, his great belly shaking with the effort, eyes narrowed in concentration. A full-blood Spokane, Arnold was somehow born with pale, pretty skin and eyes with color continually changing from gray to brown. He liked to sit in the sandwich chair and wait for Uncle Moses to make him a good sandwich.

It took Arnold five minutes to run across the field, and all the while Moses watched him, studied his movements, the way Arnold’s hair reached out in all directions, uncombed, so close to electricity, closer to lightning. He did not wear braids, could not sit long enough for his mother.

Be still, be still
, she would say between her teeth, but Arnold loved his body too much to remain still.

Big as he was, Arnold was still graceful in his movements, in his hands when he touched his face listening to a good story. He was also the best basketball player in the reservation grade school. Uncle Moses sometimes walked to the playground just to watch Arnold play and wonder at the strange, often improbable gifts a person can receive.

We are all given something to compensate for what we have lost
. Moses felt those words even though he did not say them.

Arnold arrived, breathing hard.

“Ya-hey, Little Man,” Uncle Moses said.

“Hello, Uncle,” Arnold replied, extending his hand in a half-shy, half-adult way, a child’s greeting, the affirmation of friendship.

“Where are the others?” Uncle Moses asked, taking Arnold’s hand in his own.

“There was a field trip,” Arnold answered. “All the others went to a baseball game in Spokane. I hid until they left.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to see you.”

Moses smiled at Arnold’s unplanned kindness. He held the child’s hand a little tighter and pulled him up close.

“Little Man,” he said. “You have done a good thing.”

Arnold smiled, pulled his hand away from Moses, and covered his smile, smiling even harder.

“Uncle Moses,” he said through his fingers. “Tell me a good story.”

Uncle Moses sat down in the story chair and told this very story.

My mother sits quietly, rips a seam, begins to hum a slow song through her skinny lips.

“What you singing?” I ask.

“I’m singing an it-is-a-good-day song.”

She smiles and I have to smile with her.

“Did you like the story?” I ask.

She keeps singing, sings a little louder and stronger as I take my Diet Pepsi outside and wait in the sun. It is warm, soon to be cold, but that’s in the future, maybe tomorrow, probably the next day and all the days after that. Today, now, I drink what I have, will eat what is left in the cupboard, while my mother finishes her quilt, piece by piece.

Believe me, there is just barely enough goodness in all of this.

S
OMEBODY FORGOT THE CHARCOAL
; blame the BIA.

I’ve never heard any Indian play the piano until Victor bought a secondhand baby grand at a flea market and hauled it out to the reservation in the back of a BIA pickup. All that summer the piano collected spiders and warm rain, until it swelled like a good tumor. I asked him over and over, “Victor, when you going to play that thing?” He would smile, mumble some unintelligible prayer, and then whisper to me close, “There is a good day to die and there is a good day to play the piano.” Just before the barbecue Victor pushed the piano halfway across the reservation, up against a pine tree, flexed his muscles, cracked his knuckles, sat down at the keys, and pounded out Béla Bartók. In the long silence after Victor finished his piece, after the beautiful dissonance and implied survival, the Spokane Indians wept, stunned by this strange and familiar music.

“Well,” Lester FallsApart said. “It ain’t Hank Williams but I know what it means.”

Then Nadine said, “You can tell so much about a family by whether their piano is in or out of tune.”

There is something beautiful about the cool grass beneath a picnic table. I was there, almost asleep, when my love crawled under, wrapped her arms around me, and sang into my ear. Her breath sweet and damp with Kool-Aid and a hot dog,
mustard but no catsup, please
. The sunlight squeezed through spaces between wood, fell down knotholes, but just enough to warm my face.

There is something beautiful about an Indian boy with hair so black it collects the sunlight. His braids grow hot to the touch and his skin shines with reservation sweat. He is skinny and doesn’t know how to spit. In the foot race with other Indian boys he wins a blue ribbon, and in the wrestling match he wins a medallion with an eagle etched in cheap metal. There are photographs taken; I use them now as evidence of his smile.

There is something beautiful about broken glass and the tiny visions it creates. For instance, the glass from that shattered beer bottle told me there was a twenty-dollar bill hidden in the center of an ant pile. I buried my arms elbow-deep in the ants but all I found was a note that said
Some people will believe in anything
. And I laughed.

There is something beautiful about an ordinary carnival.

Simon won the horseshoe pitch with a double-ringer that was so perfect we all knew his grandchildren would still be telling the story, and Simon won the storytelling contest when he told us the salmon used to swim so thick in the Spokane River that an Indian could walk across the water on their backs.

“You don’t think Jesus Christ was walking on just faith?” he asked us all.

Simon won the coyote contest when he told us that basketball should be our new religion.

He said, “A ball bouncing on hardwood sounds like a drum.”

He said, “An all-star jacket makes you one of the Shirt Wearers.”

Simon won the one-on-one basketball tournament with a jump shot from one hundred years out.

“Do you think it’s any coincidence that basketball was invented just one year after the Ghost Dancers fell at Wounded Knee?” he asked me and you.

And then Seymour told Simon, “Winning all those contests makes you just about as famous as the world’s best xylophone player.”

All the Indians were running; they were running. There was no fear, no pain. It was the pleasure of bare foot inside tennis shoe; it was the pleasure of tennis shoe on red dirt.

That Skin with the long hair leaning against the pine tree,
yes, that one
, is in love with that other Skin sitting at the picnic table drinking a Pepsi. Neither has the words to describe this but they know how to dance,
yes, they know how to dance
.

Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories?

And finally this, when the sun was falling down so beautiful we didn’t have time to give it a name, she held the child born of white mother and red father and said, “Both sides of this baby are beautiful.”

We have to believe in the power of imagination

because it’s all we have, and ours is stronger

than theirs.

—Lawrence Thornton

I
MAGINE CRAZY HORSE
invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington, D.C. Would the urban Indians still be sprawled around the one-room apartment in the cable television reservation? Imagine a loaf of bread could feed the entire tribe. Didn’t you know Jesus Christ was a Spokane Indian? Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?

I am in the 7-11 of my dreams, surrounded by five hundred years of convenient lies. There are men here who take inventory, scan the aisles for minute changes, insist on small bills. Once, I worked the graveyard shift in a Seattle 7-11, until the night a man locked me in the cooler and stole all the money out of the cash register. But more than that, he took the dollar bill from my wallet, pulled the basketball shoes off my feet, and left me waiting for rescue between the expired milk and broken eggs. It was then I remembered the story of the hobo who hopped a train heading west, found himself locked in a refrigerator car, and froze to death. He was discovered when the train arrived at its final destination, his body ice cold, but the refrigerator car was never turned on, the temperature inside never dropped below fifty degrees. It happens that way: the body forgets the rhythm of survival.

Survival = Anger × Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.

The reservation doesn’t sing anymore but the songs still hang in the air. Every molecule waits for a drumbeat; every element dreams lyrics. Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named
Forgiveness
.

The Indian child hears my voice on the telephone and he knows what color shirt I’m wearing. A few days or years ago, my brother and I took him to the bar and he read all of our futures by touching hands. He told me the twenty-dollar bill hidden in my shoe would change my life.
Imagine
, he said. But we all laughed, old Moses even spit his false teeth into the air, but the Indian child touched another hand, another, and another, until he touched every Skin.
Who do you think you are?
Seymour asked the Indian child.
You ain’t some medicine man come back to change our lives
. But the Indian child told Seymour his missing daughter was in community college in San Francisco and his missing wedding ring was in a can of commodity beef high up in his kitchen. The Indian child told Lester his heart was buried at the base of a pine tree behind the Trading Post. The Indian child told me to break every mirror in my house and tape the pieces to my body. I followed his vision and the Indian child laughed and laughed when he saw me, reflecting every last word of the story.

What do you believe in? Does every Indian depend on Hollywood for a twentieth-century vision? Listen: when I was young, living on the reservation, eating potatoes every day of my life, I imagined the potatoes grew larger, filled my stomach, reversed the emptiness. My sisters saved up a few quarters and bought food coloring. For weeks we ate red potatoes, green potatoes, blue potatoes. In the dark, “The Tonight Show” on the television, my father and I telling stories about the food we wanted most. We imagined oranges, Pepsi-Cola, chocolate, deer jerky. We imagined the salt on our skin could change the world.

July 4th and all is hell
. Adrian, I am waiting for someone to tell the truth. Today I am celebrating the Indian boy who blew his fingers off when an M80 exploded in his hand. But thank God for miracles, he has a thumb left to oppose his future. I am celebrating Tony Swaggard, sleeping in the basement with two thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks when some spark of flame or history touched it all off. Driving home, I heard the explosion and thought it was a new story born. But, Adrian, it’s the same old story, whispered past the same false teeth. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old jumps off billboards down into our stomachs? Adrian, what did you say?
I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic but tonight is my laundry night
. How do we imagine a new life when a pocketful of quarters weighs our possibilities down?

There are so many possibilities in the reservation 7-11, so many methods of survival. Imagine every Skin on the reservation is the new lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, on the cover of a rock-and-roll magazine. Imagine forgiveness is sold 2 for 1. Imagine every Indian is a video game with braids. Do you believe laughter can save us? All I know is that I count coyotes to help me sleep. Didn’t you know? Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. Adrian, imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.

A
FTER THE ARGUMENT THAT
I had lost but pretended to win, I stormed out of the HUD house, jumped into the car, and prepared to drive off in victory, which was also known as defeat. But I realized that I hadn’t grabbed my keys. At that kind of moment, a person begins to realize how he can be fooled by his own games. And at that kind of moment, a person begins to formulate a new game to compensate for the failure of the first.

“Honey, I’m home,” I yelled as I walked back into the house.

My wife ignored me, gave me a momentary stoic look that impressed me with its resemblance to generations of television Indians.