“Pretty hot out tonight?” he asked, that old rhetorical weather bullshit question designed to put us both at ease.
“Hot enough to make you go crazy,” I said and smiled. He swallowed hard like a white man does in those situations. I looked him over. Same old green, red, and white 7-Eleven jacket and thick glasses. But he wasn’t ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness. If he wasn’t working there that night, he’d be at home alone, flipping through channels and wishing he could afford HBO or Showtime.
“Will this be all?” he asked me, in that company effort to make me do some impulse shopping. Like adding a clause onto a treaty. We’ll take Washington and Oregon and you get six pine trees and a brand-new Chrysler Cordoba. I knew how to make and break promises.
“No,” I said and paused. “Give me a Cherry Slushie, too.”
“What size?” he asked, relieved.
“Large,” I said, and he turned his back to me to make the drink. He realized his mistake but it was too late. He stiffened, ready for the gunshot or the blow behind the ear. When it didn’t come, he turned back to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What size did you say.”
“Small,” I said and changed the story.
“But I thought you said large.”
“If you knew I wanted a large, then why did you ask me again?” I asked him and laughed. He looked at me, couldn’t decide if I was giving him serious shit or just goofing. There was something about him I liked, even if it was three in the morning and he was white.
“Hey,” I said. “Forget the Slushie. What I want to know is if you know all the words to the theme from ‘The Brady Bunch’?”
He looked at me, confused at first, then laughed.
“Shit,” he said. “I was hoping you weren’t crazy. You were scaring me.”
“Well, I’m going to get crazy if you don’t know the words.”
He laughed loudly then, told me to take the Creamsicle for free. He was the graveyard-shift manager and those little demonstrations of power tickled him. All seventy-five cents of it. I knew how much everything cost.
“Thanks,” I said to him and walked out the door. I took my time walking home, let the heat of the night melt the Creamsicle all over my hand. At three in the morning I could act just as young as I wanted to act. There was no one around to ask me to grow up.
In Seattle, I broke lamps. She and I would argue and I’d break a lamp, just pick it up and throw it down. At first she’d buy replacement lamps, expensive and beautiful. But after a while she’d buy lamps from Goodwill or garage sales. Then she just gave up the idea entirely and we’d argue in the dark.
“You’re just like your brother,” she’d yell. “Drunk all the time and stupid.”
“My brother don’t drink that much.”
She and I never tried to hurt each other physically. I did love her, after all, and she loved me. But those arguments were just as damaging as a fist. Words can be like that, you know? Whenever I get into arguments now, I remember her and I also remember Muhammad Ali. He knew the power of his fists but, more importantly, he knew the power of his words, too. Even though he only had an IQ of 80 or so, Ali was a genius. And she was a genius, too. She knew exactly what to say to cause me the most pain.
But don’t get me wrong. I walked through that relationship with an executioner’s hood. Or more appropriately, with war paint and sharp arrows. She was a kindergarten teacher and I continually insulted her for that.
“Hey, schoolmarm,” I asked. “Did your kids teach you anything new today?”
And I always had crazy dreams. I always have had them, but it seemed they became nightmares more often in Seattle.
In one dream, she was a missionary’s wife and I was a minor war chief. We fell in love and tried to keep it secret. But the missionary caught us fucking in the barn and shot me. As I lay dying, my tribe learned of the shooting and attacked the whites all across the reservation. I died and my soul drifted above the reservation.
Disembodied, I could see everything that was happening. Whites killing Indians and Indians killing whites. At first it was small, just my tribe and the few whites who lived there. But my dream grew, intensified. Other tribes arrived on horseback to continue the slaughter of whites, and the United States Cavalry rode into battle.
The most vivid image of that dream stays with me. Three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head. When I first dreamed it, I thought it was just a product of my anger and imagination. But since then, I’ve read similar accounts of that kind of evil in the old West. Even more terrifying, though, is the fact that those kinds of brutal things are happening today in places like El Salvador.
All I know for sure, though, is that I woke from that dream in terror, packed up all my possessions, and left Seattle in the middle of the night.
“I love you,” she said as I left her. “And don’t ever come back.”
I drove through the night, over the Cascades, down into the plains of central Washington, and back home to the Spokane Indian Reservation.
When I finished the Creamsicle that the 7-Eleven clerk gave me, I held the wooden stick up into the air and shouted out very loudly. A couple lights flashed on in windows and a police car cruised by me a few minutes later. I waved to the men in blue and they waved back accidentally. When I got home it was still too hot to sleep so I picked up a week-old newspaper from the floor and read.
There was another civil war, another terrorist bomb exploded, and one more plane crashed and all aboard were presumed dead. The crime rate was rising in every city with populations larger than 100,000, and a farmer in Iowa shot his banker after foreclosure on his 1,000 acres.
A kid from Spokane won the local spelling bee by spelling the word rhinoceros.
When I got back to the reservation, my family wasn’t surprised to see me. They’d been expecting me back since the day I left for Seattle. There’s an old Indian poet who said that Indians can reside in the city, but they can never live there. That’s as close to truth as any of us can get.
Mostly I watched television. For weeks I flipped through channels, searched for answers in the game shows and soap operas. My mother would circle the want ads in red and hand the paper to me.
“What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” I said, and normally, for almost any other Indian in the country, that would have been a perfectly fine answer. But I was special, a former college student, a smart kid. I was one of those Indians who was supposed to make it, to rise above the rest of the reservation like a fucking eagle or something. I was the new kind of warrior.
For a few months I didn’t even look at the want ads my mother circled, just left the newspaper where she had set it down. After a while, though, I got tired of television and started to play basketball again. I’d been a good player in high school, nearly great, and almost played at the college I attended for a couple years. But I’d been too out of shape from drinking and sadness to ever be good again. Still, I liked the way the ball felt in my hands and the way my feet felt inside my shoes.
At first I just shot baskets by myself. It was selfish, and I also wanted to learn the game again before I played against anybody else. Since I had been good before and embarrassed fellow tribal members, I know they would want to take revenge on me. Forget about the cowboys versus Indians business. The most intense competition on any reservation is Indians versus Indians.
But on the night I was ready to play for real, there was this white guy at the gym, playing with all the Indians.
“Who is that?” I asked Jimmy Seyler.
“He’s the new BIA chief’s kid.”