I remember when people used to think I was smart.
I remember when people used to think my brain was useful.
Damaged by water, sure. And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.
After class, I caught up to Gordy in the hallway.
"Hey, Gordy," I said. "Thanks."
"Thanks for what?" he said.
"Thanks for sticking up for me back there. For telling Dodge the truth."
"I didn't do it for you," Gordy said. "I did it for science."
He walked away. I stood there and waited for the rocks to replace my bones and blood.
I rode the bus home that night.
Well, no, I rode the bus to the end of the line, which was the reservation border.
And there I waited.
My dad was supposed to pick me up. But he wasn't sure if I'd have enough gas money.
Especially if he was going to stop at the rez casino and play slot machines first.
I waited for thirty minutes.
Exactly.
Then I started walking.
Getting to school was always an adventure.
After school, I'd ride the bus to the end of the line and but for my folks.
If they didn't come, I'd start walking.
Hitchhiking in the opposite direction.
Somebody was usually heading back home to the rez, so I'd usually catch a ride.
Three times, I had to walk the whole way home.
Twenty-two miles.
I got blisters each time.
Anyway, after my petrified wood day, I caught a ride with a Bureau of Indian Affairs
white guy and he dropped me off right in front of my house.
I walked inside and saw that my mother was crying.
I often walked inside to find my mother crying.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It's your sister," she said.
"Did she run away again?"
"She got married."
Wow, I was freaked. But my mother and father were absolutely freaked. Indian families
stick together like Gorilla Glue, the strongest adhesive in the world. My mother and father both lived within two miles of where they were born, and my grandmother lived one mile from where she was born. Ever since the Spokane Indian Reservation was founded back in 1881, nobody in my family had ever lived anywhere else. We Spirits stay in one place. We are absolutely tribal.
For good or bad, we don't leave one another. And now, my mother and father had lost two kids to the outside world.
I think they felt like failures. Or maybe they were just lonely. Or maybe they didn't know what they were feeling.
I didn't know what to feel. Who could understand my sister?
After seven years of living in the basement and watching TV, after doing absolutely nothing at all, my sister decided she needed to change her life.
I guess I'd kind of shamed her.
If I was brave enough to go to Reardan, then she'd be brave enough to MARRY A
FLATHEAD INDIAN AND MOVE TO MONTANA.
"Where'd she meet this guy?" I asked my mother.
"At the casino," she said. "Your sister said he was a good poker player. I guess he travels to all the Indian casinos in the country."
"She married him because he plays cards?"
"She said he wasn't afraid to gamble everything, and that's the kind of man she wanted to spend her life with."
I couldn't believe it. My sister married a guy for a damn silly reason. But I suppose
people often get married for damn silly reasons.
"Is he good-looking?" I asked.
"He's actually kind of ugly," my mother said. "He has this hook nose and his eyes are way different sizes."
Damn, my sister had married a lopsided, eagle-nosed, nomadic poker player.
It made me feel smaller.
I thought I was pretty tough.
But I'd just have to dodge dirty looks from white kids while my sister would be dodging gunfire in beautiful Montana Those Montana Indians were so tough that white people wen scared of them.
Can you imagine a place where white people are scared of Indians and not the other way
around?
That's Montana.
And my sister had married one of those crazy Indians.
She didn't even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom
from St. Ignatius, Montana on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and said, "Hey, Mom, I'm a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever."
How weird is that? It's almost romantic.
And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared.
Well, a lot scared.
She was trying to live out her dream. We should have all been delirious that she'd moved out of the basement. We'd been trying to get her out of there for years. Of course, my mother and father would have been happy if she'd just gotten a part-time job at the post office or trading post, and maybe just moved into an upstairs bedroom in our house.
But I just kept thinking that my sister's spirit hadn't been killed. She hadn't given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana.
How cool!
I felt inspired.
Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were
going absolutely crazy.
But I thought we were being warriors, you know?
And a warrior isn't afraid of confrontation.
So I went to school the next day and walked right up to Gordy the Genius White Boy.
"Gordy," I said. "I need to talk to you."
"I don't have time," he said. "Mr. Orcutt and I have to tie bug some PCs. Don't you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague."
Wow, and people thought I was a freak.
"I much prefer Macs, don't you?" he asked. "They're so poetic."
This guy was in love with computers. I wondered if he was secretly writing a romance
about a skinny, white boy genius who was having sex with a half-breed Apple computer.
"Computers are computers," I said. "One or the other, it's all the same."
Gordy sighed.
"So, Mr. Spirit," he said. "Are you going to bore me with your tautologies all day or are you going to actually say some thing?"
Tautologies? What the heck were tautologies? I couldn't ask Gordy because then he'd
know I was an illiterate Indian idiot.
"You don't know what a tautology is, do you?" he asked.
"Yes, I do," I said. "Really, I do. Completely, I do."
"You're lying."
"No, I'm not."
"Yes, you are."
"How can you tell?"
"Because your eyes dilated, your breathing rate increased a little bit, and you started to sweat."
Okay, so Gordy was a human lie detector machine, too.
"All right, I lied," I said. "What is a tautology?"
Gordy sighed again.
I HATED THAT SIGH! I WANTED TO PUNCH THAT SIGH IN THE FACE!
"A tautology is a repetition of the same sense in different words," he said.
"Oh," I said.
What the hell was he talking about?
"It's a redundancy."
"Oh, you mean, redundant, like saying the same thing over and over but in different ways?"
"Yes."
"Oh, so if I said something like, 'Gordy is a dick without ears and an ear without a dick,'
then that would be a tautology."
Gordy smiled.
"That's not exactly a tautology, but it is funny. You have a singular wit."
I laughed.
Gordy laughed, too. But then he realized that I wasn't laughing WITH him. I was