“Excuse me,” Corliss said to the young man. “Was that W. H. Auden you were quoting?”
“Yes,” he said. His smile was genuine and boyish. He had displayed his intelligence and was being rewarded for it. Why shouldn’t he smile?
“I didn’t recognize the quote,” Corliss said. “Which poem did it come from?”
The young man looked at Corliss and at the young woman. Corliss knew he was choosing between them. The young woman knew it, too, and she decided the whole thing was pointless.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, grabbed her backpack, and fled.
“Wow, that was quick,” he said. “Rejected at the speed of light.”
“Sorry about that,” Corliss said. But she was pleased with the young woman’s quick decision and quicker flight. If she could resist one man’s efforts to shape and determine her future, perhaps she could resist all future efforts.
“It’s all right,” the young man said. “Do you want to sit down, keep me company?”
“No thanks,” Corliss said. “Tell me about that Auden quote.”
He smiled again. He studied her. She was very short, a few inches under five feet, maybe thirty pounds overweight, and plain-featured. But her skin was clear and dark brown (like good coffee!), and her long black hair hung down past her waist. And she wore red cowboy boots, and her breasts were large, and she knew about Auden, and she was confident enough to approach strangers, so maybe her beauty was eccentric, even exotic. And exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Corliss.”
“That’s a beautiful name. What does it mean?”
“It means Corliss is my name. Are you going to tell me where you read that Auden quote or not?”
“You’re Indian, aren’t you?”
“Good-bye,” she said and stood to leave.
“Wait, wait,” he said. “You don’t like me, do you?”
“You’re cute and smart, and you’ve gotten everything you’ve ever asked for, and that makes you lazy and dangerous.”
“Wow, you’re honest. Will you like me better if I’m honest?”
“I might.”
“I’ve never read Auden’s poems. Not much, anyway. I read some article about him. They quoted him on the thing about Jews and poems. I don’t know where they got it from. But it’s true, don’t you think?”
“What’s true?”
“A good gun will always beat a good poem.”
“I hope not,” Corliss said and walked away.
Back in Spokane, Washington, Corliss had attended Spokane River High School, which had contained a mirage-library. Sure, the books had looked like Dickens and Dickinson from a distance, but they turned into cookbooks and auto-repair manuals when you picked them up. As a poor kid, and a middle-class Indian, she seemed destined for a minimum-wage life of waiting tables or changing oil. But she had wanted a maximum life, an original aboriginal life, so she had fought her way out of her underfunded public high school into an underfunded public college. So maybe, despite American racism, sexism, and classism, Corliss’s biography confirmed everything nearly wonderful and partially meritorious about her country. Ever the rugged individual, she had collected aluminum cans during the summer before her junior year of high school so she could afford the yearlong SAT-prep course that had astronomically raised her scores and won her a dozen academic scholarships. At the beginning of every semester, Corliss had called the history and English teachers at the local prep school she couldn’t afford, and asked what books they would be reading in class, and she had found those books and lived with them like siblings. And those same teachers, good white people whose whiteness and goodness blended and separated, had faxed her study guides and copies of the best student papers. Two of those teachers, without having met Corliss in person, had sent her graduation gifts of money and yet more books. She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who stole a rich education from white people and kept it.
In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.
She found W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems on a shelf above her head. She stood on her toes and pulled down the thick volume, but she also pulled out another book that dropped to the floor. It was a book of poems titled In the Reservation of My Mind, by Harlan Atwater. According to the author’s biography on the back cover, Harlan Atwater was a Spokane Indian, but Corliss had never heard of the guy. Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all born and raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation. And the rest of her ancestors, going back a dozen generations, were born and raised on the land that would eventually be called the Spokane Indian Reservation. Her one white ancestor, a Russian fur trapper, had been legally adopted into the tribe, given some corny Indian name she didn’t like to repeat, and served on the tribal council for ten years. Corliss was a Spokane Indian born in Sacred Heart Hospital, only a mile from the Spokane River Falls, the heart of the Spokane Tribe, and had grown up in the city of Spokane, which was really an annex of the reservation, and thought she knew or knew of every Spokane. Demographically and biologically speaking, Corliss was about as Spokane as a Spokane Indian can be, and only three thousand other Spokanes of various Spokane-ness existed in the whole world, so how had this guy escaped her attention? She opened the book and read the first poem:
The Naming Ceremony
No Indian ever gave me an Indian name
So I named myself.
I am Crying Shame.
I am Takes the Blame.
I am the Four Directions:
South, A Little More South,
Way More South, and All the Way South.
If you are ever driving toward Mexico
And see me hitchhiking, you’ll know me
By the size of my feet.
My left foot is named Self-Pity
And my right foot is named Born to Lose.
But if you give me a ride, you can call me
And all of my parts any name you choose.
Corliss recognized the poem as a free-verse sonnet whose end rhymes gave it a little more music. It was a funny and clumsy poem desperate to please the reader. It was like a slobbery puppy in an animal shelter: Choose me! Choose me! But the poem was definitely charming and strange. Harlan Atwater was making fun of being Indian, of the essential sadness of being Indian, and so maybe he was saying Indians aren’t sad at all. Maybe Indians are just big-footed hitchhikers eager to tell a joke! That wasn’t a profound thought, but maybe it was an accurate one. But can you be accurate without profundity? Corliss didn’t know the answer to the question.
She carried the Atwater and Auden books to the front desk to check them out. The librarian was a small woman wearing khaki pants and large glasses. Corliss wanted to shout at her: Honey, get yourself some contacts and a pair of leather chaps! Fight your stereotypes!
“Wow,” the librarian said as she scanned the books’ bar codes and entered them into her computer.