The next morning, I went to school. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to sit at home all day and talk to a million cousins. I knew my mother would be cooking food for
everybody and that my father would be hiding out in his bedroom again.
I knew everybody would tell stories about Mary.
And the whole time, I'd be thinking, "Yeah, but have you ever heard the story about how I killed my sister when I left the rez?"
And the whole time, everybody would be drinking booze and getting drunk and stupid
and sad and mean. Yeah, doesn't that make sense? How do we honor the drunken death of a young married couple?
HEY, LET'S GET DRUNK!
Okay, listen, I'm not a cruel bastard, okay? I know that people were very sad. I knew that my sister's death made everybody remember all the deaths in their life. I know that death is never added to death; it multiplies. But still, I couldn't I stay and watch all of those people get drunk. I couldn't do it. If you'd given me a room full of sober Indians, crying and laughing and telling stories about my sister, then I would have gladly stayed and joined them in the ceremony.
But everybody was drunk.
Everybody was unhappy.
And they were drunk and unhappy in the same exact way.
So I fled my house and went to school. I walked through the snow for a few miles until a white BIA worker picked me up and delivered me to the front door.
I walked inside, into the crowded hallways, and all sorts of boys and girls, and teachers, came up and hugged me and slapped my shoulder and gave me little punches in the belly.
They were worried for me. They wanted to help me with my pain.
I was important to them.
I mattered.
Wow.
All of these white kids and teachers, who were so suspicious of me when I first arrived, had learned to care about me. Maybe some of them even loved me. And I'd been so suspicious of them. And now I care about a lot of them. And loved a few of them.
Penelope came up to me last.
She was WEEPING. Snot ran down her face and it was still sort of sexy.
"I'm so sorry about your sister," she said.
I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask you how it
feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?
Remembering
Today my mother, father, and I went to the cemetery and cleaned graves.
We took care of Grandmother Spirit, Eugene, and Mary.
Mom had packed a picnic and Dad had brought his saxophone, so we made a whole day
of it.
We Indians know how to celebrate with our dead.
And I felt okay.
My mother and father held hands and kissed each other.
"You can't make out in a graveyard," I said.
"Love and death," my father said. "It's all love and death."
"You're crazy," I said.
"I'm crazy about you," he said.
And he hugged me.
And he hugged my mother.
And she had tears in her eyes.
And she held my face in her hands.
"Junior," she said. "I'm so proud of you."
That was the best thing she could have said.
In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang on to the good and sober
moments tightly.
I was happy. But I still missed my sister, and no amount of love and trust was going to make that better.
I love her. I will always love her.
I mean, she was amazing. It was courageous of her to leave the basement and move to
Montana. She went searching for her dreams, and she didn't find them, but she made the attempt.
And I was making the attempt, too. And maybe it would kill me, too, but I knew that
staying on the rez would have killed me, too.
It all made me cry for my sister. It made me cry for myself.
But I was crying for my tribe, too. I was crying because I knew five or ten or fifteen more Spokanes would die during the next year, and that most of them would die because of booze.
I cried because so many of my fellow tribal members were slowly killing themselves and
I wanted them to live. I wanted them to get strong and get sober and get the hell off the rez.
It's a weird thing.
Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto
reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.
But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps.
I wept because I was the only one who was brave and crazy enough to leave the rez. I
was the only one with enough arrogance.
I wept and wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I
was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world.
I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream.
I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.
And the tribe of cartoonists.
And the tribe of chronic masturbators.
And the tribe of teenage boys.
And the tribe of small-town kids.
And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.
And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.
And the tribe of poverty.
And the tribe of funeral-goers.
And the tribe of beloved sons.
And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends.
It was a huge realization.
And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay.
But it also reminded me of the people who were not going to be okay.
It made me think of Rowdy.
I missed him so much.
I wanted to find him and hug him and beg him to forgive me for leaving.
Talking About Turtles
The reservation is beautiful.
I mean it.
Take a look.
There are pine trees everywhere. Thousands of ponderosa pine trees. Millions. I guess
maybe you can take pine trees for granted. They're just pine trees. But they're tall and thin and green and brown and big.
Some of the pines are ninety feet tall and more than three hundred years old.
Older than the United States.
Some of them were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president.
Some of them were alive when George Washington was president.
Some of them were alive when Benjamin Franklin was born.
I'm talking old.
I've probably climbed, like, one hundred different trees in my lifetime. There are twelve in my backyard. Another fifty or sixty in the small stand of woods across the field. And another twenty or thirty around our little town. And a few way out in the deep woods.
And that tall monster that sits beside the highway to West End, past Turtle Lake.
That one is way over one hundred feet tall. It might be one hundred and fifty feet tall.
You could build a house using just the wood from that tree.
When we were little, like ten years old, Rowdy and I climbed that sucker.
It was probably stupid. Yeah, okay, it was stupid. It's not like we were lumberjacks or anything. It's not like we used anything except our hands, feet, and dumb luck.
But we weren't afraid of falling that day.
Other days, yeah, I'm terrified of falling. No matter how old I get, I think I'm always going to be scared of falling. But I wasn't scared of gravity on that day. Heck, gravity didn't even exist.