The Toughest Indian in the World (26 page)

When I was six years old, a bear came out of hibernation too early, climbed up on the roof of the Catholic Church, and promptly fell back asleep. In itself not an amazing thing, but what had amazed me then, and amazes me now, is that nobody, not one Spokane Indian, bothered that bear. Nobody called the police or the Forest Service. None of the Indian hunters took advantage of a defenseless animal, even those Indian hunters who’d always taken advantage of defenseless animals and humans. Hell, even the reservation dogs stopped barking whenever they strolled past the church. We all, dogs and Indians alike, just continued on with our lives, going to work or school, playing basketball and hide-and-seek, scratching at fleas, sleeping with other people’s spouses, marking our territory, while that bear slept on.

During that brief and magical time, “How’s the bear?” replaced “How are you doing?” as the standard greeting.

What is an Indian?
Is it the lead actor in a miracle or the witness who remembers the miracle?

For three or four days, that bear (that Indian!) had slept, unmolested, dreaming his bear dreams, until the bright sun had disturbed him one sunrise. Bob May happened to be there with his camera and shot up a roll of film as the bear climbed down from the church, stretched his spine and legs, and then ambled off into the woods, never to be seen again.

But all of that was years ago, decades ago, long before I brought my father home from the hospital to die, before I left him alone in his bedroom where he dreamed his diabetic dreams.

What is an Indian?
Is it a son who can stand in a doorway and watch his father sleep?

Just after sundown, I woke my father from his nap, set him in his wheelchair, and rolled him into the kitchen.

“Do you remember that Catholic bear?” I asked him as we ate tomato soup at the table, which was really just a maple-wood door nailed to four two-by-sixes. The brass doorknob was still attached. The tomato soup was homemade, from my father’s recipe. He’d once been the head chef at Ankeny’s, the best restaurant in Spokane. I’d waited tables there one summer and made fifty bucks in tips every shift. Good money for an eighteen-year-old. Better yet, I’d lost my virginity on a cool July evening to a waitress named Carla, a white woman who was twenty years older. She’d always called me sweetheart and had let me sleep with her only once. Any more than that, she’d said, and you’re going to fall in love with me, and then I’ll just have to break your heart. I’d been grateful to her and told her so. I never saw her again after that summer, but I sent her Christmas cards for ten years, even though I’d never received a response, and only stopped when the last card had been returned with no forwarding address.

“The one that climbed on the church?” asked my father, remembering. His hand trembled as he lifted his spoon to his lips. He’d slept for three hours but he still looked exhausted.

“Yeah, what do you think happened to it?” I asked.

“It owns a small auto shop in beautiful Edmonton, British Columbia.”

“Bear’s Repairs?”

“Exactly.”

We laughed together at our silly joke, until he coughed and gagged. My father, once a handsome man who’d worn string ties and fedoras, was now an old man, a tattered bathrobe on a stick.

“Excuse me,” he said, strangely polite, as he spat into his cup.

We ate without further conversation. What was there to say? He slurped his soup, a culinary habit that had irritated me throughout our lives together, but I didn’t mind it at all as we shared that particular meal.

“When are you heading back to Spokane?” he asked after he finished eating and pushed away his empty bowl.

“I’m not.”

“Don’t you have to teach?”

“I took a leave of absence. I think the Catholic teenagers of Spokane, Washington, can diagram sentences and misread
To Kill a Mockingbird
without me.”

“Are you sure about that, Atticus?”

“Positive.”

He picked at his teeth with his tongue. He was thinking hard.

“What are you going to do about money?” he asked.

“I’ve got some saved up,” I said. Of course, in my economic dictionary, I’d discovered
some
meant
very little.
I had three thousand dollars in savings and maybe five hundred in checking. I’d been hoping it would last six months, or until my father died. By the light in his eyes, I knew he was guessing at exactly how much I’d saved and also wondering if it would last. He carried a tiny life insurance policy that would pay for the cost of his burial.

“It’s you and me, then,” he said.

“Yes.”

He wouldn’t look at me. “What do you think they did with them?”

“With what?”

“My feet,” he said. We both looked down at his legs, at the bandaged stumps where his feet used to be.

“I think they burn them,” I said.

What is an Indian?

That’s what the professor wrote on the chalkboard three minutes into the first class of my freshman year at Washington State University.

What is an Indian?

The professor’s name was Dr. Lawrence Crowell (don’t forget the doctorate!) and he was, according to his vita, a Cherokee-Choctaw-Seminole-Irish-Russian Indian from Hot Springs, Kentucky, or some such place.

“What is an Indian?” asked Dr. Crowell. He paced around the small room—there were twenty of us terrified freshmen—and looked each of us in the eyes. He was a small man, barely over five feet tall, with gray eyes and grayer hair.

“What is an Indian?” he asked me as he stood above me. I suppose he might have been trying to
tower
over me, but I was nearly as tall as he was even while sitting down, so that bit of body language failed to translate in his favor.

“Are you an Indian?” he asked me.

Of course I was. (Jesus, my black hair hung down past my ass and I was dark as a pecan!) I’d grown up on my reservation with my tribe. I understood most of the Spokane language, though I’d always spoken it like a Jesuit priest. Hell, I’d been in three car wrecks! And most important, every member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians could tell you the exact place and time where I’d lost my virginity. Why? Because I’d told each and every one of them. I mean, I knew the real names, nicknames, and secret names of every dog that had lived on my reservation during the last twenty years.

“Yeah, I’m Indian,” I said.

“What kind?” asked Dr. Crowell.

“Spokane.”

“And that’s all you are?”

“Yeah.”

“Your mother is Spokane?”

“Full-blood.”

“And your father as well?”

“Full-blood.”

“Really? Isn’t that rare for your tribe? I thought the Spokanes were very mixed.”

“Well, my dad once tried to make it with a Cherokee-Choctaw-Seminole-Irish-Russian, but poor guy, he just couldn’t get it up.”

My classmates laughed.

“You know,” I added. “My momma always used to tell me, those mixed-blood Indians, they just ain’t sexy enough.”

My classmates laughed even louder.

“Get out of my classroom,” Dr. Crowell said to me. “And don’t come back until you can show me some respect. I am your elder.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and left the room.

Of course, my mother’s opinion about the general desirability of mixed-blood Indians had been spoken mostly in jest. She had always been a funny woman.

“I mean, there’s so many sexy white guys in the world,” my mother had once told me. “There are white guys who like being white, and what’s not to like? They own everything. So, if you get the chance to sleep with a real white guy, especially one of them with a British accent or something, or Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, then why are you going to waste your time on some white guy who says he’s part Indian? Jeez, if I wanted to sleep with part-Indians, then I could do that at every powwow. Hell, I could get an orgy going with eight or nine of those Cherokees and maybe, just maybe, they would all add up to one real Indian.”

“And besides all that, listen to me, son,” she’d continued. “If your whole mission in life is to jump an Indian, then why not jump the Indian with the most Indian going on inside of him? And honey, believe me when I say that every last inch of your daddy is Indian.”

She’d laughed then and hugged me close. She’d always loved to talk nasty. For her, the telling of a dirty joke had always been the most traditional and sacred portion of any conversation.

“If I’m going after a penis only because it’s Indian,” my mother had said, “then it better be a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed, American Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, indigenous penis. Hey, I don’t want to get into some taste test, and realize one of these penises is Coke and the other one is Pepsi.”

Tears had rolled down her face as she’d laughed. At that moment, I loved her so much that I could barely breathe. I was twelve years old and she was teaching me about sex and all of its complications.

Her best piece of sexual advice: “Son, if you’re going to marry a white woman, then marry a rich one, because those white-trash women are just Indians with bad haircuts.”

The last thing she ever said to me: “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”

Of course, my mother would have felt only contempt for a man like Dr. Lawrence Crowell, not because he was a white man who wanted to be Indian (God! When it came right down to it, Indian was the best thing to be!), but because he thought he was entitled to tell other Indians what it meant to be Indian.

What is an Indian?
Is it a son who brings his father to school as show-and-tell?

“Excuse me, sir,” Crowell said to my father as we both walked into the room. “Are you in my class?”

“Sweetheart,” said my father. “You’re in my class now.”

After that, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t need to say a word. My father sat at a desk, pulled out his false teeth, tucked them into his pants pocket, and smiled his black-hole smile the whole time. My father also wore a U.S. Army T-shirt that said
Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.
Of course, my father had never actually served in the military (He was a pacifist!) but he knew how to wield the idea of a gun.

“What is an Indian?” Crowell asked as he stood in front of the classroom.

My father raised his left hand.

“Anybody?” asked the professor.

With his hand high above his head, my father stood from his chair.

“Anybody?”

My father dropped his hand, walked up to the front, and stood directly in front of Crowell.

“Sir,” he said to my father. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Are you an Indian?”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

“I don’t know,” said my father. “Now, you may have some Indian blood. I can see a little bit of that aboriginal bone structure in your face, but you ain’t Indian. No. You might even hang out with some Indians. Maybe even get a little of the ha-ha when one of the women is feeling sorry for you. But you ain’t Indian. No. You might be a Native American but you sure as hell ain’t Indian.”

“Listen, I don’t have to take this from you. Do you want me to call security?”

“By the time security arrived, I could carefully insert your right foot deep into your own rectum.”

I hid my face and stifled my laughter. My father hadn’t been in a fistfight since sixth grade and she’d beaten the crap out of him.

“Are you an Indian?” my father asked again.

“I was at Alcatraz during the occupation.”

“That was, what, November ’69?”

“Yeah, I was in charge of communications. How about you?”

“I took my wife and kids to the Pacific Ocean, just off Neah Bay. Most beautiful place in the world.”

Though I’d been only three years old at the time, I remembered brief images of the water, the whales, and the Makah Indians who lived there in Neah Bay, or perhaps I had only stolen my memories, my images, from my father’s stories. In hearing his stories a thousand times over the years, had I unconsciously memorized them, had I colonized them and pretended they were mine? One theory: we can fool ourselves into believing any sermon if we repeat it enough times. Proof of theory: the number of times in his life the average human whispers
Amen.
What I know: I’m a liar. What I remember or imagine I remember: we stayed in Neah Bay during the off-season, so there were very few tourists, though tourists had rarely visited Neah Bay before or since that time, not until the Makahs had decided to resume their tradition of hunting whales. The tourists came because they wanted to see the blood. Everybody, white and Indian alike, wanted to see the blood.

What is an Indian?
Is it a man with a spear in his hands?

“What about Wounded Knee?” Crowell asked my father. “I was at Wounded Knee. Where were you?”

“I was teaching my son here how to ride his bike. Took forever. And when he finally did it, man, I cried like a baby, I was so proud.”

“What kind of Indian are you? You weren’t part of the revolution.”

“I’m a man who keeps promises.”

It was mostly true. My father had kept most of his promises, or had tried to keep all of his promises, except this one: he never stopped eating sugar.

After we shared that dinner of homemade tomato soup, my father slept in his bed while I sat awake in the living room and watched the white noise of the television. My father’s kidneys and liver were beginning to shut down.
Shut down.
So mechanical. At that moment, if I had closed my eyes, I could have heard the high-pitched whine of my father’s engine (it was working too hard!) and the shudder of his chassis. In his sleep, he was climbing a hill (downshifting all the way!) and might not make it over the top.

At three that morning, I heard my father coughing, and then I heard him retching, gagging. I raced into his room, flipped on the light, and discovered him drenched in what I thought was blood.

“It’s the soup, it’s just the soup,” he said and laughed at the fear in my face. “I threw up the soup. It’s tomatoes, the tomatoes.”

I undressed him and washed his naked body. His skin had once been dark and taut, but it had grown pale and loose.

“You know how to get rid of tomato stains?” he asked.