“There you go, cousin,” he said finally as he stopped his pickup in front of the Powwow Tavern. “I hope it all works out, you know?”
I shook his hand, offered him a few exaggerated gifts, made a couple promises that he knew were just promises, and waved wildly as he drove off, backwards, and away from the rest of my life. Then I walked into the tavern, shook my body like a dog shaking off water. I’ve always wanted to walk into a bar that way.
“Where the hell is Suzy Boyd?” I asked.
“Right here, asshole,” Suzy answered quickly and succinctly.
“Okay, Suzy,” I asked. “Where the hell is my wife?”
“Right here, asshole,” my wife answered quickly and succinctly. Then she paused a second before she added, “And quit calling me your wife. It makes me sound like I’m a fucking bowling ball or something.”
“Okay, okay, Norma,” I said and sat down beside her. I ordered a Diet Pepsi for me and a pitcher of beer for the next table. There was no one sitting at the next table. It was just something I always did. Someone would come along and drink it.
“Norma,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I have cancer and I’m sorry I’m dying.”
She took a long drink of her Diet Pepsi, stared at me for a long time. Stared hard.
“Are you going to make any more jokes about it?” she asked.
“Just one or two more, maybe,” I said and smiled. It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Norma slapped me in anger, had a look of concern for a moment as she wondered what a slap could do to a person with terminal cancer, and then looked angry again.
“If you say anything funny ever again, I’m going to leave you,” Norma said. “And I’m fucking serious about that.”
I lost my smile briefly, reached across the table to hold her hand, and said something incredibly funny. It was maybe the best one-liner I had ever uttered. Maybe the moment that would have made me a star anywhere else. But in the Powwow Tavern, which was just a front for reality, Norma heard what I had to say, stood up, and left me.
Because Norma left me, it’s even more important to know how she arrived in my life.
I was sitting in the Powwow Tavern on a Saturday night with my Diet Pepsi and my second-favorite cousin, Raymond.
“Look it, look it,” he said as Norma walked into the tavern. Norma was over six feet tall. Well, maybe not six feet tall but she was taller than me, taller than everyone in the bar except the basketball players.
“What tribe you think she is?” Raymond asked me.
“Amazon,” I said.
“Their reservation down by Santa Fe, enit?” Raymond asked, and I laughed so hard that Norma came over to find out about the commotion.
“Hello, little brothers,” she said. “Somebody want to buy me a drink?”
“What you having?” I asked.
“Diet Pepsi,” she said and I knew we would fall in love.
“Listen,” I told her. “If I stole 1,000 horses, I’d give you 501 of them.”
“And what other women would get the other 499?” she asked.
And we laughed. Then we laughed harder when Raymond leaned in closer to the table and said, “I don’t get it.”
Later, after the tavern closed, Norma and I sat outside on my car and shared a cigarette. I should say that we pretended to share a cigarette since neither of us smoked. But we both thought the other did and wanted to have all that much more in common.
After an hour or two of coughing, talking stories, and laughter, we ended up at my HUD house, watching late-night television. Raymond was passed out in the backseat of my car.
“Hey,” she said. “That cousin of yours ain’t too smart.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But he’s cool, you know?”
“Must be. Because you’re so good to him.”
“He’s my cousin, you know? That’s how it is.”
She kissed me then. Soft at first. Then harder. Our teeth clicked together like it was a junior high kiss. Still, we sat on the couch and kissed until the television signed off and broke into white noise. It was the end of another broadcast day.
“Listen,” I said then. “I should take you home.”
“Home?” she asked. “I thought I was at home.”
“Well, my tipi is your tipi,” I said, and she lived there until the day I told her that I had terminal cancer.
I have to mention the wedding, though. It was at the Spokane Tribal Longhouse and all my cousins and her cousins were there. Nearly two hundred people. Everything went smoothly until my second-favorite cousin, Raymond, drunk as a skunk, stood up in the middle of the ceremony, obviously confused.
“I remember Jimmy real good,” Raymond said and started into his eulogy for me as I stood not two feet from him. “Jimmy was always quick with a joke. Make you laugh all the damn time. I remember once at my grandmother’s wake, he was standing by the coffin. Now, you got to remember he was only seven or eight years old. Anyway, he starts jumping up and down, yelling, She moved, she moved.”
Everyone at the wedding laughed because it was pretty much the same crowd that was at the funeral. Raymond smiled at his newly discovered public speaking ability and continued.
“Jimmy was always the one to make people feel better, too,” he said. “I remember once when he and I were drinking at the Powwow Tavern when all of a sudden Lester FallsApart comes running in and says that ten Indians just got killed in a car wreck on Ford Canyon Road. Ten Skins? I asked Lester, and he said, Yeah, ten. And then Jimmy starts up singing, One little, two little, three little Indians, four little, five little, six little Indians, seven little, eight little, nine little Indians, ten little Indian boys.”
Everyone in the wedding laughed some more, but also looked a little tense after that story, so I grabbed Raymond and led him back to his seat. He stared incredulously at me, tried to reconcile his recent eulogy with my sudden appearance. He just sat there until the preacher asked that most rhetorical of questions:
“And if there is anyone here who has objections to this union, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
Raymond staggered and stumbled to his feet, then staggered and stumbled up to the preacher.
“Reverend,” Raymond said. “I hate to interrupt, but my cousin is dead, you know? I think that might be a problem.”
Raymond passed out at that moment, and Norma and I were married with his body draped unceremoniously over our feet.
Three months after Norma left me, I lay in my hospital bed in Spokane, just back from another stupid and useless radiation treatment.
“Jesus,” I said to my attending physician. “A few more zaps and I’ll be Superman.”
“Really?” the doctor said. “I never realized that Clark Kent was a Spokane Indian.”
And we laughed, you know, because sometimes that’s all two people have in common.
“So,” I asked her. “What’s my latest prognosis?”
“Well,” she said. “It comes down to this. You’re dying.”
“Not again,” I said.
“Yup, Jimmy, you’re still dying.”
And we laughed, you know, because sometimes you’d rather cry.
“Well,” the doctor said. “I’ve got other patients to see.”
As she walked out, I wanted to call her back and make an urgent confession, to ask forgiveness, to offer truth in return for salvation. But she was only a doctor. A good doctor, but still just a doctor.
“Hey, Dr. Adams,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just wanted to hear your name. It sounds like drums to these heavily medicated Indian ears of mine.”