“That’s my grandmother’s regalia,” I said to Rose of Sharon and Junior.
“How do you know for sure?” Junior asked.
I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever. I’d seen only photographs of my grandmother dancing in it. And that was before somebody stole it from her fifty years ago. But it sure looked like my memory of it, and it had all the same colors of feathers and beads that my family always sewed into their powwow regalia.
“There’s only one way to know for sure,” I said.
So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the old white man working behind the counter.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“That’s my grandmother’s powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Somebody stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been looking for it ever since.”
The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops are filled with liars.
“I’m not lying,” I said. “Ask my friends here. They’ll tell you.”
“He’s the most honest Indian I know,” Rose of Sharon said.
“All right, honest Indian,” the pawnbroker said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Can you prove it’s your grandmother’s regalia?”
Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on their regalia. But we always hid it where you had to search hard to find it.
“If it really is my grandmother’s,” I said, “there will be one yellow bead hidden somewhere on it.”
“All right, then,” the pawnbroker said. “Let’s take a look.”
He pulled the regalia out of the window, laid it down on his glass counter, and we searched for that yellow bead and found it hidden beneath the armpit.
“There it is,” the pawnbroker said. He didn’t sound surprised. “You were right. This is your grandmother’s regalia.”
“It’s been missing for fifty years,” Junior said.
“Hey, Junior,” I said. “It’s my family’s story. Let me tell it.”
“All right,” he said. “I apologize. You go ahead.”
“It’s been missing for fifty years,” I said.
“That’s his family’s sad story,” Rose of Sharon said. “Are you going to give it back to him?”
“That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t give away a thousand dollars.”
“We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.
“Hey,” I said to her, “don’t go threatening people.”
The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking hard about the possibilities.
“Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said.”
He sounded sad about that. Like he was sorry for taking advantage of our disadvantages.
“What’s your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.
“Jackson,” I said.
“Is that first or last?” he asked.
“Both.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, it’s true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jackson. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family is funny.”
“All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a thousand dollars, would you?”
“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.
“That’s too bad,” he said and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar. It would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”
“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.
“That’s too bad,” he said again and thought harder about the possibilities. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow with the money, and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”
“It sounds good,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here’s twenty bucks to get you started.”
He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.
1:00
P.M
.
Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7–Eleven and spent it to buy three bottles of imagination. We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in one day. Thinking hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off those bottles one, two, and three.
2:00
P.M
.
Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke. I heard later she had hitchhiked back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.
Junior was passed out beside me, covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else’s vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him alone and walked down to the water. I loved the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.
When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen north ever since.
These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back.
“How long has your boat been gone?” I asked.
“Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said.
I cried with them for a while.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?”
They didn’t.
3:00
P.M
.
I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out. I put my face down near his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was alive, so I dug around in his blue-jean pockets and found half a cigarette. I smoked it all the way down and thought about my grandmother.
Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. My father thought Agnes caught her tumors from the uranium mine on the reservation. But my mother said the disease started when Agnes was walking back from the powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She broke three ribs, and my mother said those ribs never healed right, and tumors always take over when you don’t heal right.
Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and salt and vomit, I wondered if my grandmother’s cancer had started when somebody stole her powwow regalia. Maybe the cancer started in her broken heart and then leaked out into her breasts. I know it’s crazy, but I wondered if I could bring my grandmother back to life if I bought back her regalia.
I needed money, big money, so I left Junior and walked over to the Real Change office.
4:00
P.M.
“Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, supports cultural projects that empower the poor and homeless, and mobilizes the public around poverty issues. Real Change’s mission is to organize, educate, and build alliances to create solutions to homelessness and poverty. They exist to provide a voice to poor people in our community.”