“I never wrote another poem after that night,” Harlan said. “It seemed indecent.”
“I think poetry writing is supposed to feel indecent.”
“Well, maybe. You’re young. I was young, too. And I made a lot of fuss about some fairly inconsequential poems. It’s not like I was famous or rich or talented. I was ordinary, or maybe a little better than ordinary, and I wanted to be more than that, and I couldn’t be, and it hurt for a long time. I think writing poems, I think if I would’ve kept writing them, I would’ve always been reminded of that, of how ordinary I am.”
Corliss wondered what sort of person could continue working jobs that made him feel ordinary. But everybody worked those jobs. Corliss didn’t believe there was a huge difference between the average pizza deliveryman’s self-esteem and Clint Eastwood’s. Or maybe she only wanted to believe there was no real difference. How do small people feel larger? Well, silly, they pretend the large people are smaller. In an ideal world, Corliss thought, everybody weighs 150 pounds!
“Can I ask you a human question?” she asked.
“What’s a human question?” he asked.
“A homeless guy taught me the phrase. I think it’s a variation on a personal question.”
“You’re a strange, strange woman,” he said.
She couldn’t disagree.
“All right,” he said. “Go ahead. Ask away.”
“What have you been doing all these years?”
“I still drive a forklift down on the waterfront. Nothing spectacular. I’m going to retire at the end of the year. I’ve got a big pension coming. It’s good money, honest work, I guess, as long as I don’t think too hard about what’s in the boxes, you know?”
Corliss knew about denial.
“And I take care of my folks,” he said. “I still live with them in the house. That’s why I didn’t let you in. They’re old and sick. They took care of me then. I take care of them now.”
“Were they good parents?” she asked.
“Better than most, I suppose,” he said. “But the thing is, shoot, they could have completely ignored me, and it wouldn’t have mattered much. Because they saved my life. I mean, I know they’re white and I’m Indian, and that’s supposed to be such a sad-sack story, but well, they did, they really saved my life.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, shoot,” he said. “I went looking for my real mother once. And it took me a few years, but I found her. She was living alone in Los Angeles. Living in some downtown dive hotel, and she was smoking crack, you know? That’s what my real mother was doing the first time I saw her. I was sitting in my car outside that hotel, because it was scary, you know? And I saw this old Indian woman walking down the street, walking with a cane, and her face was all swollen, and her legs were all swollen. And she had all these sores all over her arms and legs and face. And she looked like a zombie, you know? Like Stephen King’s nightmare Indian.”
“How’d you know it was your mother?” Corliss asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just knew. I mean, she looked like me. I looked like her. But there was something else, too. I felt connected. And she started coughing. I was parked fifty feet away, but I could hear her coughing so loud. She was retching up stuff and spitting it on the sidewalk. And it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. And this was my mother. This was the woman who gave birth to me, who’d left me behind. I felt sorry for her and loved her and hated her all at the same time, you know?”
Corliss knew about mothers and their difficult love.
“I opened the door and got out. I was going to walk across the street and stop her and say to her — I’d rehearsed it all — I was going to say, ‘Mother, I am your son.’ Basic, simple, clean. Nothing dramatic. Still, I thought even that simple statement might kill her. I keep thinking I might shock her into a heart attack, she looked so frail and weak. I’m walking across the street toward her, and she’s coughing, and I’m getting closer, and then she reaches into her pocket, pulls out this crack pipe and a lighter, and she lights up right there in the middle of the street. Broad daylight. She lights up and sucks the crap in. And I kept walking right past her, came within a foot of her, you know. I could smell her. She didn’t even look at me. She just kept sucking at that pipe. Old Indian woman sucking on a crack pipe. It was sad and ridiculous, but you know the worst part?”
“What?” Corliss asked.
Harlan stood and walked down the aisle away from Corliss. He spoke with his back to her.
“I was happy to see my mother like that,” he said. “I was smiling when I walked away from her. I just kept thinking how lucky I was, how blessed, that this woman didn’t raise me. I just kept thinking God had chosen me, had chosen these two white people to swoop in and save me. Do you know how terrible it is to feel that way? And how good it feels, too?”
“I don’t have any idea how you feel,” Corliss said. Her confusion was the best thing she could offer. What could she say to him that would matter? She’d spent her whole life talking. Words had always been her weapon, her offense and defense, and she felt that her silence, her wordlessness, might be the only thing she could give him.
“The thing is,” he said, “the two best, the two most honorable and loyal people in my life are my white mother and my white father. So, you tell me, kid, what kind of Indian does that make me?”
Corliss knew only Harlan could answer that question for himself. She knew the name of her tribe, and the name of her archaic clan, and her public Indian name, and her secret Indian name, but everything else she knew about Indians was ambiguous and transitory.
“What’s your name?” she asked him. “What’s your real name?”
Harlan Atwater faced her. He smiled, turned away, and walked out of the store. She could follow him and ask for more. She could demand to know his real name. She could interrogate him for days and attempt to separate his truth from his lies and his exaggerations from his omissions. But she let him go. She understood she was supposed to let him go. And he was gone. But Corliss sat for hours in the bookstore. She didn’t care about time. She was tired and hungry, but she sat and waited. Indians are good at waiting, she thought, especially when we don’t know what we’re waiting for. But there comes a time when an Indian stops waiting, and when that time came for Corliss, she stood, took Harlan Atwater’s book to the poetry section, placed it with its front cover facing outward for all the world to see, and then she left the bookstore and began her small journey back home.
Lawyer’s League
MY FATHER IS AN African American giant who played defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies, and my mother is a petite Spokane Indian ballerina who majored in dance at U-Dub, so genetically speaking, I’m a graceful monster. But my father spent more time reading Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis than pumping iron in the weight room, and my mother played supernatural point guard for an all-Native women’s barnstorming basketball team, so culturally speaking, I’m a biracial revolutionary leftist magician with a twenty-foot jumper encoded in my DNA.