“And I’ll tell you what,” her father said. “After Corliss graduates from college and gets her law degree, she’s going to move back to the reservation and fix what’s wrong. We men have had our chances, I’ll tell you what. We’ll send all the tribal councilmen to the golf courses and let the smart women run the show. I’ll tell you what. My daughter is going to save our tribe.”
Yes, her family loved and supported her, so how could she resent them for being clueless about her real dreams and ambitions? Her mother and father and all of her uncles and aunts sent her money to help her through college. How many times had she opened an envelope and discovered a miraculous twenty-dollar bill? The family and the tribe were helping her, so maybe she was a selfish bitch for questioning the usefulness of tribalism. Here she was sitting in a corner of her tiny apartment, pretending to be alone in the world, the one poetic Spokane, and she was reading a book of poems, of sonnets, by another Spokane. How could she ever be alone if Harlan Atwater was somewhere out there in the world? Okay, his poems weren’t great. Some of them were amateurish and trite, and others were comedic throwaways, but there were a few poems and a few lines that contained small bits of power and magic:
The Little Spokane
My river is not the same size as your river.
My river is smaller and colder.
My river begins in the north
And rushes to find me.
My river calls to me.
I swim it because it is water.
Water doesn’t care about anybody
But this water cares about me.
Or maybe it doesn’t care about me.
Maybe the river thinks I’m driftwood
Or a rubber tire or a bird or a dead dog.
Maybe the river is not a river.
Maybe the river is my father.
Maybe he’s smaller and colder than your father.
Corliss had swum the Little Spokane River. She’d floated down the river in a makeshift raft. She’d drifted beneath bridges and the limbs of trees. She’d been in the physical and emotional places described in the poem. She’d been in the same places where Harlan Atwater had been, and that made her sad and happy. She felt connected to him and wanted to know more about him. She picked up the telephone and called her mother.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Corliss, hey, sweetie, it’s so good to hear your voice. I miss you.”
Her mother was a loan officer for Farmers’ Bank. Twenty years earlier, she’d started as a bank teller and had swum her way up the corporate fish ladder.
“I miss you, too, Mom. How is everybody?”
“We’re still Indian. How’s school going?”
“Good.”
All of their conversations began the same way. The mother-daughter telephone ceremony. Corliss knew her mother would soon become emotional and tell her how proud the family was of her accomplishments.
“I don’t know if we tell you this enough,” her mother said. “But we’re so proud of you.”
“You tell me every time we talk.”
“Oh, well, you know, I’m a mother. I’m supposed to talk that way. It’s just, well, you’re the first person from our family to ever go to college.”
“I know, Mom, you don’t need to tell me my résumé.”
“You don’t need to get smart.”
Corliss couldn’t help herself. She loved her mother, but her mother was a bipolar storyteller who told lies during her manic phases and heavily exaggerated during her depressed times. Those lies and exaggerations were often flattering to Corliss, so it was hard to completely resent them. According to the stories, Corliss had already been accepted to Harvard Medical School but had declined because she didn’t feel Harvard would respect her indigenous healing methods. You couldn’t hate a mother full of such tender and flattering garbage, but you could certainly view her with a large measure of contempt.
“I’m sorry, Mom. Listen, I picked up this book of poems—”
“Corliss, you know how your father feels about those poems.”
“They’re poems, Mom, not crack.”
“I know you love them, honey, but how are you going to get a job with poems? You go to a job interview, and they ask you what you did in college, and you say ‘poems,’ then what are your chances?”
“Maybe I’ll work in a poem factory.”
“Don’t get smart.”
“I can’t help it. I am smart.”
Corliss knew she was smart because her mother was smart, but she also knew she’d inherited a little bit of her mother’s crazies as well. Why else would she be calling to talk about a vanished Indian poet? The crazy mother — crazy daughter telephone ceremony!
“So did you call to break my heart,” her mother said, “or do you have some other reason?”
“I called about this book of poems.”
“Okay, so tell me about your book of poems.”
“It’s written by this guy called Harlan Atwater. It says he’s a Spokane. Do you know him?”
Her mother was the unofficial historian of the urban Spokane Indians. Corliss figured “historian” and “pathological liar” meant the same thing in all cultures and countries.
“Harlan Atwater? Harlan Atwater?” her mother repeated the name and tried to place it. “Nope. Don’t know him. Don’t know any Spokanes named Atwater.”
“His book was published in 1972. It’s called In the Reservation of My Mind. Do you remember that?”
“I don’t read books much.”
“Yes, I know, Mom. But you’re aware there are inventions called books and inside some of those books they have things called poems.”
“I know what books are, smart-ass daughter.”
“Okay, then, have you heard of this book?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“I thought you knew every Spokane.”
“I guess I don’t. Have you looked him up on the Internet?”
“How do you know about the Internet?”
“I’m old, Corliss, I’m not stupid.”
“Oh, jeez, Mom, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be such a jerk. It’s just, this book, is pretty cool. It’s getting me all riled up.”
“It’s okay. You’re always riled up. I love that about you.”
“I love you, too, Mom. I got to go.”
“Okay, bye-bye.”
Corliss hung up the telephone, grabbed her backpack and coat, and hurried to the campus computer lab. She was too poor to afford her own computer and was ashamed of her poverty. Corliss talked her way past the work-study student who’d said the computers were all reserved by other poor students. She sat at a Mac and logged on. Her user name was “CrazyIndian,” and her password was “StillCrazy.” She typed “Harlan Atwater, Native American poet, Spokane Indian” into the search engine and found nothing. She didn’t find him with any variations of the search, either. She couldn’t find his book on Amazon.com, Alibris.com, or Powells.com. She couldn’t find any evidence that Harlan Atwater’s book had ever existed. She couldn’t find the press that had published his book. She couldn’t find any reviews or mention of the book. She sent e-mails to two dozen different Indian writers, including Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Adrian C. Louis, and those who responded said they’d never heard of Harlan Atwater. She paged through old government records. Maybe he’d been a criminal and had gone to prison. Maybe he’d been married and divorced. Maybe he’d died in a spectacular car wreck. But she couldn’t find any mention of him. The library didn’t have any record of where or when the book had been purchased. The Spokane Tribal Enrollment Office didn’t have any records of his existence. According to the enrollment secretary, who also happened to be Corliss’s second cousin, there’d never been an enrolled Spokane Indian named Atwater. Corliss was stumped and suspicious. Every moment of an Indian’s life is put down in triplicate on government forms, collated, and filed. Indians are given their social security numbers before the OB/GYN sucks the snot and blood out of their throats. How could this Harlan Atwater escape the government? How could an Indian live and work in the United States and not leave one piece of paper to mark his passage? Corliss thought Harlan Atwater might be a fraud, a white man pretending to be an Indian, seeking to make a profit, to co-opt and capitalize. Then again, what opportunistic white man was stupid enough to think he could profit from pretending to be a Spokane Indian? Even Spokane Indians can’t profit from being Spokane! How many people had ever heard of the Spokane Tribe of Indians? Corliss felt like a literary detective, a poetic gumshoe, Sam Spade with braids. She worked for hours and days, and finally, two weeks after she first came across his book, she found an interview printed in Radical Seattle Weekly: