There are people — white folks, mostly — who are extremely uncomfortable in the presence of black people. And I know plenty of Indians — my parents, for example — who are also uncomfortable around black folks. As for me? I suppose I’d always been the kind of nonblack person who celebrated himself for not being uncomfortable around blacks. But now, as I watched those black men jostle one another up and down the aisles, I was afraid — no, I was nervous. What if they recognized me? What if they were friends of Elder Briggs? What if they attacked me?
Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential. Those young black men paid for their energy drinks and left the store. I paid for my candy bar, walked out to my car, and drove toward the movie theater.
One block later, I had to hit my brakes when those same black guys jaywalked across the street in front of me. All of them stared me down and walked as slowly as possible through the crosswalk. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years and I’d often had this same encounter with young black men. It was some remnant of the warrior culture, I suppose.
When it had happened before, I had always made it a point to smile goofily and wave to the black men who were challenging me. Since they thought I was a dorky white guy, I’d behave like one. I’d be what they wanted me to be.
But this time, when those black men walked in slow motion in front of me, I did not smile or laugh. I just stared back at them. I knew I could hit the gas and slam into them and hurt them, maybe even kill them. I knew I had that power. And I knew that I would not use that power. But what about these black guys? What power did they have? They could only make me wait at an intersection. And so I waited. I waited until they walked around the corner and out of my vision. I waited until another driver pulled up behind me and honked his horn. I was supposed to move, and so I went.
DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM?
Sharon and I were college sweethearts at St. Jerome the Second University in Seattle, or, as it is affectionately known, St. Junior’s. We met at the first mixer dance of our freshman year and soon discovered we were the only confirmed Native American Roman Catholics within a three-mile radius of campus, so we slept together that inaugural night, in open defiance of Pope Whomever, and kept sleeping together for the next three years. It was primary love: red girl and red boy on white sheets.
Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.
My white mother, Mary, bless her soul, raised me all by herself in Seattle because my Indian daddy, Marvin, died of stomach cancer when I was a baby. I never knew him, but I spent half of every summer on the Spokane Reservation with his mother and father, my grandparents. My mother wanted me to keep in touch with my tribal heritage, but mostly, I read spy novels to my grandfather and shopped garage sales and secondhand stores with my grandmother. I suppose, for many Indians, garage sales and trashy novels are highly traditional and sacred. We all make up our ceremonies as we go along, right? I thought the reservation was ordinary and magical, like a sedate version of Disneyland. All told, I loved to visit but loved my home much more. In Seattle, my mother was a corporate lawyer for old-money companies and sent me to Lakeside Upper School, where I was a schoolmate of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who have become the new-money kings of the world.
Sharon went to St. Therese’s School for Girls. Her parents, Wilson and Pauline, were both architects; they helped build three of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. If Zeus ate a few million pounds of glass, steel, and concrete, his offal would look something like those buildings. However fecal, those monstrosities won awards and made Wilson and Pauline very popular and wealthy. They lived in a self-designed home on Lake Washington that was lovely and tasteful in all ways except for its ridiculously turquoise exterior. I don’t know whether they painted the house turquoise to honor the sacred stone of the Southwest or if they were being ironic: Ha! We’re Apache Indians from the desert, and this is our big blue house on the water! Deal with it!
Sharon and I were Native American royalty, the aboriginal prince and princess of western Washington. Sure, we’d been thoroughly defeated by white culture, but dang it, we were conquered and assimilated National Merit Scholars in St. Junior’s English honors department.
Sharon and I were in love and happy and young and skinny and beautiful and hyperliterate. We recited Shakespeare monologues as foreplay: To be or not to be, take off your panties, oh, Horatio, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, I’m going to wear your panties now. All over campus, we were known as Sharon-and-David-the-Bohemian-Indians. We were inseparable. We ate our meals together and fed each other. Risking expulsion for moral violations, we sneaked into each other’s dorm rooms at night and made love while our respective roommates covered their heads with pillows. Sharon and I always tried to take the same classes and mourned the other’s absence whenever we couldn’t. We read the same books and discussed them while we were naked and intertwined. Oh Lord, we were twins conjoined at the brain, heart, and crotch.
I proposed to Sharon on the first day of our senior year, and she accepted, and we planned to secretly elope on the day after our graduation.
In June, the day before graduation, Sharon and I were taking one last walk along the path beside the anonymous creek that ran through the middle of campus. We were saying good-bye to a good place. Overgrown with fern and blackberry thickets, the creek had been left wild and wet.
“‘Whose woods these are I think I know,’” I said.
“Robert Frost wrote the poem,” said Sharon. We were playing Name the Poet, a game of our own invention.
“‘Know’ and ‘poem,’” I said. “A clumsy rhyme, don’t you think?”
“You stink,” she said and laughed too loudly. Her joy was always rowdy, rude, and pervasive. I laughed with her and pulled her close to me and pressed my face into her hair and breathed in her scent. After the first time we’d made love, she’d said, Now I know what you smell like, and no matter what else happens to us, I’m always going to know what you smell like.
“Hey,” I said as we walked the creek. “How about we climb into the bushes and I get you a little wild and wet?”
We kissed and kissed until she pulled away.
“Do you hear that?” she said.
“What?”
“I think it’s a cat. Can you hear it meowing?”
I listened and heard nothing.
“You’re imagining things,” I said.
“No, it’s a cat. I can hear it. It sounds pitiful.”
“There must be a hundred cats around here. City cats. They’re tough.”
“No, it sounds hurt. Listen.”
I listened and finally heard the faint feline cry.
“It’s down there in the creek somewhere,” she said.
We peered over the edge and could barely see the water through the thick and thorny overgrowth.
“I’m sure it’s hunting rats or something,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“No, listen to it. It’s crying. I think it’s stuck.”
“What do you want me to do? It’s just a dumb-ass cat.”
“Can you go find it?”
I looked again at the jungle between that cat and me.