Isn't that tough love?
Rowdy is the toughest kid on the rez. He is long and lean and strong like a snake.
His heart is as strong and mean as a snake, too.
But he is my best human friend and he cares about me, so he would always tell me the
truth.
And he is right. Nobody would miss me if I was gone.
Well, Rowdy would miss me, but he'd never admit that he'd miss me. He is way too
tough for that kind of emotion.
But aside from Rowdy, and my parents and sister and grandmother, nobody would miss
me.
I am a zero on the rez. And if you subtract zero from zero, you still have zero. So what's the point of subtracting when the answer is always the same?
So I gut it out.
I have to, I guess, especially since Rowdy is having one of the worst summers of his life.
His father is drinking hard and throwing hard punches, so Rowdy and his mother are
always walking around with bruised and bloody faces.
"It's war paint," Rowdy always says. "It just makes me look tougher."
And I suppose it does make him look tougher, because Rowdy never tries to hide his
wounds. He walks around the rez with a black eye and split lip.
This morning, he limped into our house, slumped in a chair, threw his sprained knee up
on the table, and smirked.
He had a bandage over his left ear.
"What happened to your head?" I asked.
"Dad said I wasn't listening," Rowdy said. "So he got all drunk and tried to make my ear a little bigger."
My mother and father are drunks, too, but they aren't mean like that. Not at all. They
sometimes ignore me. Sometimes they yell at me. But they never, ever, never, ever hit me. I've never even been spanked. Really. I think my mother sometimes wants to haul off and give me a slap, but my father won't let it happen.
He doesn't believe in physical punishment; he believes in staring so cold at me that I turn into a ice-covered ice cube with an icy filling.
My house is a safe place, so Rowdy spends most of his time with us. It's like he's a family member, an extra brother and son.
"You want to head down to the powwow?" Rowdy asked.
"Nah," I said.
The Spokane Tribe holds their annual powwow celebration over the Labor Day weekend.
This was the 127th annual one, and there would be singing, war dancing, gambling, storytelling, laughter, fry bread, hamburgers, hot dogs, arts and crafts, and plenty of alcoholic brawling.
I wanted no part of it.
Oh, the dancing and singing are great. Beautiful, in fact, but I'm afraid of all the Indians who aren't dancers and singers. Those rhythmless, talentless, tuneless Indians are most likely going to get drunk and beat the shit out of any available losers.
And I am always the most available loser.
"Come on," Rowdy said. "I'll protect you."
He knew that I was afraid of getting beat up. And he also knew that he'd probably have to fight for me.
Rowdy has protected me since we were born.
Both of us were pushed into the world on November 5, 1992, at Sacred Heart Hospital in
Spokane. I'm two hours older than Rowdy. I was born all broken and twisted, and he was born mad.
He was always crying and screaming and kicking and punching.
He bit his mother's breast when she tried to nurse him. He kept biting her, so she gave up and fed him formula.
He really hasn't changed much since then.
Well, at fourteen years old, it's not like he runs around biting women's breasts, but he does punch and kick and spit.
He got into his first fistfight in kindergarten. He took on three first graders during a snowball fight because one of them had thrown a piece of ice. Rowdy punched them out pretty quickly.
And then he punched the teacher who came to stop the fight.
He didn't hurt the teacher, not at all, but man, let me tell you, that teacher was angry.
"What's wrong with you?" he yelled.
"Everything!" Rowdy yelled back.
Rowdy fought everybody.
He fought boys and girls.
Men and women.
He fought stray dogs.
Hell, he fought the weather.
He'd throw wild punches at rain.
Honestly.
"Come on, you wuss," Rowdy said. "Let's go to powwow. You can't hide in your house forever. You'll turn into some kind of troll or something."
"What if somebody picks on me?" I asked.
"Then I'll pick on them."
"What if somebody picks my nose?" I asked.
"Then I'll pick your nose, too," Rowdy said.
"You're my hero," I said.
"Come to the powwow," Rowdy said. "Please."
It's a big deal when Rowdy is polite.
"Okay, okay," I said.
So Rowdy and I walked the three miles to the powwow grounds. It was dark, maybe eight
o'clock or so, and the drummers and singers were loud and wonderful.
I was excited. But I was getting hypothermic, too.
The Spokane Powwow is wicked hot during the day and freezing cold at night.
"I should have worn my coat," I said.
"Lighten up," Rowdy said.
"Let's go watch the chicken dancers," I said.
I think the chicken dancers are cool because, well, they dance like chickens. And you
already know how much I love chicken.
"This crap is boring," Rowdy said.
"We'll just watch for a little while," I said. "And then we'll go gamble or something."
"Okay," Rowdy said. He is the only person who listens to me.
We weaved our way through the parked cars, vans, SUVs, RVs, plastic tents, and deer-
hide tepees.
"Hey, let's go buy some bootleg whiskey," Rowdy said. "I got five bucks."
"Don't get drunk," I said. "You'll just get ugly."
"I'm already ugly," Rowdy said.
He laughed, tripped over a tent pole, and stumbled into a minivan. He bumped his face
against a window and jammed his shoulder against the rearview mirror.
It was pretty funny, so I laughed.
That was a mistake.
Rowdy got mad.
He shoved me to the ground and almost kicked me. He swung his leg at me, but pulled it
back at the last second. I could tell he wanted to hurt me for laughing. But I am his friend, his best friend, his only friend. He couldn't hurt me. So he grabbed a garbage sack filled with empty beer bottles and hucked it at the minivan.
Glass broke everywhere.
Then Rowdy grabbed a shovel that somebody had been using to dig barbecue holes and
went after that van. Just beat the crap out of it.
Smash! Boom! Bam!
He dented the doors and smashed the windows and knocked off the mirrors.
I was scared of Rowdy and I was scared of getting thrown in jail for vandalism, so I ran.
That was a mistake.
I ran right into the Andruss brothers' camp. The Andrusses—John, Jim, and Joe—are the
crudest triplets in the history of the world.
"Hey, look," one of them said. "It's Hydro Head."
Yep, those bastards were making fun of my brain disorder. Charming, huh?
"Nah, he ain't Hydro," said another one of the brothers. "He's Hydrogen."
I don't know which one said that. I couldn't tell them apart. I decided to run again, but one of them grabbed me, and shoved me toward another brother. All three of them shoved me to and fro. They were playing catch with me.
"Hydromatic."
"Hydrocarbon."
"Hydrocrack."
"Hydrodynamic."
"Hydroelectric."
"Hydro-and-Low."
"Hydro-and-Seek."
I fell down. One of the brothers picked me up, dusted me off, and then kneed me in the
balls.
I fell down again, holding my tender crotch, and tried not scream.