Seymour wondered if the world was a cruel place.
Are you learning how to love me? asked Seymour.
Salmon Boy sipped at his own coffee. He didn’t know how to answer that question.
I took you to the Grand Canyon, said Seymour.
Seymour said, I have made you promises and I have kept them.
The silence smelled like smoke.
It’s a difficult thing, Salmon Boy said after a long time. Salmon Boy whispered, It’s a difficult thing for one man to love another man, whether they kiss each other or not.
We’ve only kissed once, said Seymour. Maybe we’ll fall in love if we kiss a little more.
Do you think there’s a number? asked Salmon Boy. Do you think there’s a magic number written on every heart? Do you think you can kiss right up to some magic number and make a person love you?
Seymour looked around the Tucson McDonald’s. There were white people and Navajos; there were people who preferred their Quarter Pounders with cheese and those who didn’t care for cheese at all; and there were those who desperately wished that McDonald’s would introduce onion rings to its menu.
Oh, Seymour thought, there are so many possibilities.
Do you think? he asked. Do you think there’s somebody in here who might love me, who I might love?
I don’t know, said Salmon Boy, but you are my friend, and I believe in love.
Salmon Boy remembered the reservation Indian girl who drowned in three feet of water, wrapped up in knots of seaweed, while three other Indian girls tried to pull her free. Salmon Boy believed that the life of that one drowned girl was worth the lives of every person in Arizona.
Salmon Boy placed his left hand over his heart to protect it.
How much money do we have? Seymour asked again. He wanted to be sure.
Ten dollars.
Then we’re going to need more.
Yes, yes, we are.
Seymour leapt to his feet, stood on a table in McDonald’s.
Excuse me, shouted Seymour, but we are here to take your money, not all of it, but enough to continue, enough to keep moving south.
Seymour did not have the pistol, but he held his hand in the shape of a pistol. He clung tightly to the idea of a pistol.
Click, click, click on the empty chambers.
Seymour wanted to be kind and he wanted to be romantic. He wanted to be the Man Who Saved the Indian. He wanted to be the Coyote Nailed to a Fence Post. He wanted to be the Man Who Could Shoot Thirteen People.
He was a white man, and therefore he could dream.
Seymour ordered everybody to lie down on the floor. He ordered them to give up all the money they could spare. Salmon Boy stared down into his coffee cup. In that blackness, he saw the headlights of a fast car.
Please, please, give us your money, said Seymour. Just a dollar or two, he said.
The people in McDonald’s gave up their money like an offering. They filled the plate. They moved that much closer to God.
Hurry, hurry, Seymour shouted. The police are right behind us, they’re right behind us.
Salmon Boy stared down into his coffee cup and saw a blue man with a gun.
Oh, said Salmon Boy. He said, Oh, as he rose to his feet and stood on the table beside Seymour. They were men in love with the idea of being in love.
Please, he said. He said, Please.
Seymour took all the money his victims could spare, and then he took Salmon Boy’s hand, and they ran outside into all the south and southwest that remained in the world.
THE SIN EATERS
I DREAMED ABOUT THE WAR on the night before the war began, and though nobody officially called it a war until years later, I woke that next morning with the sure knowledge that the war, or whatever they wanted to call it, was about to begin and that I would be a soldier in a small shirt.
On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rainstorm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.
Those were the days before the first color televisions were smuggled onto the reservation, but after a man with blue eyes had dropped two symmetrical slices of the sun on Japan. All of it happened before a handsome Catholic was assassinated in Dallas, leaving a bright red mark on the tape measure of time, but after the men with blue eyes had carried dark-eyed children into the ovens and made them ash.
I was a dark-eyed Indian boy who leaned against pine trees and broke them in half. I was twelve years old and strong, with fluid skin that was the same color as Chimacum Creek in April, May, when the mud and water were indistinguishable from each other.
Those were the days of the old stories, and in many of those stories I was the Indian boy who was capable of anything.
In one of those stories, I lifted a grown man, Edgar Horse, draped him over my shoulder like an old quilt, and carried him for two miles from the gnarled pine tree in front of the tribal high school all the way down to the trading post in downtown Wellpinit. I carried Edgar, as many others had carried Edgar, because we were living in the days before Indians discovered wheelchairs and the idea of wheelchairs.
In another of those stories, I was the maker of songs. Widowed grandmothers gave me dollar bills and I invented songs about their long-dead husbands. Often, as I sang, the grandmothers would weep tears that I collected into tin cups and fed to the huckleberry bushes growing on the low hills of the reservation. All these years later, those huckleberries still taste like grief, and a cellar filled with preserved huckleberries is a graveyard stacked high with glass tombstones.
Because I was the maker of songs, young men gave me small gifts, a blank piece of linen paper, a stick of gum, an envelope decorated with a beautiful, canceled stamp, and in return I taught them love songs. I taught those young men the love songs that transformed scraps of newspaper into thin birds. In the middle of a city, in the middle of a strong wind, a thousand paper birds rattled and sang. I taught those young men the love songs that forced horses to bow their heads and kneel in the fields, the love songs that revealed the secrets of fire, the love songs that healed, the love songs that precipitated wars.
In another of those stories, in one of many stories about me, about the reservation where I was born, I was the small soldier who lived with his Spokane Indian mother and his Coeur d’Alene Indian father in a two-bedroom house in a valley near the Spokane River.
I slept alone in one bedroom while my parents shared the second. The living room was small, with just enough space for an end table, console radio, and tattered couch. The kitchen was the largest room in the house. We spent most of our waking hours there at the table that my father had carved from a fallen pine tree. My father had built almost every piece of furniture in the house, but he was not a good carpenter. The chairs rocked though they were not rocking chairs. We had to place one of my father’s old work shirts under one short leg of the dining table to prevent food from sliding into our laps. The radio and all of its bright and mysterious internal organs sat inside a series of homemade wooden boxes that had to be replaced every few months because of small electrical fires.
When those fires burned, my father would laugh and dance. He would pick up the flames with his bare hands and hold them close to his chest.