Roman remembered when Michael Jordan had announced he was returning to basketball. There had been joy, pure unadulterated joy, in Jordan’s voice, in stark contrast to the grief and pain when he’d announced his retirement just a few short days after his father had been murdered by two teenage thugs. Roman recalled that one of those killers was a Lumbee Indian, a disturbing fact. But then again, it was Indian scouts who had helped white people kill Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and every other Indian warrior in the world.
I’m back.
After he’d returned to the NBA, Jordan had promptly led his Chicago Bulls to three more championships, the last coming on the final jump shot of Jordan’s career, before he’d retired again and left Roman no options other than to take up coaching grade-school basketball at the Spokane Indian Tribal School.
I’m back.
Sitting in front of his two televisions, holding the basketball in one hand, Roman ran his other hand through his greasy black hair, always too thick to properly braid, and then swallowed the last drink out of a two-liter Diet Pepsi bottle sitting on the coffee table.
Roman was forty years old and forty pounds overweight. He pulled his thick, heavy body from the couch and shuffled from the living room into the bathroom. He tugged his underwear down to his ankles and sat on the toilet for a long morning piss. He’d always been a gentleman and knew that a stand-up piss made a terrible mess, no matter the accuracy of the shooter.
Roman Gabriel Fury was named after an obscure professional football quarterback named Roman Gabriel — a man with his own kind of fury and the rumor of Indian blood — who’d toiled for the Los Angeles Rams in the early seventies. Young Roman had never seen the elder Roman play, not in person, not on television, though one photograph of the dark-haired quarterback had been framed and nailed to the wall above the Fury fireplace.
“Was he your favorite player?” young Roman had once asked his father, Edgar Fury, in an effort to understand why he’d chosen such an ornate moniker for his only child.
“No,” Edgar had said. “Just liked the name.”
“I don’t like it much.”
“Well, just be glad your name ain’t Namath Fury. Or Tarkenton Fury, for that matter. I could have named you after some old white boy quarterback.”
Partly because of his name and partly because of his own stubborn nature, Roman Fury had never played football. Instead, he’d played basketball until his palms bled, and read books, hundreds of books, thereby saving himself from a lifetime of reservation poverty.
Oh, to this day, he still loved the reservation — he lived there, after all — but there was a time when he’d wanted to travel, when he’d known that he belonged elsewhere. From the very beginning of his life, he’d dreamed of leaving, not because he needed to escape — though his journey certainly could have been viewed as a form of flight — but because he’d always known that his true and real mission lay somewhere outside the boundaries of the reservation. There were Indians who belonged on the reservation and there were Indians who belonged in the city, and then there were those rare few who could live successfully in either place. But Roman had always felt like he didn’t belong anywhere, like he couldn’t belong to any one place or any series of places. Though his tribe had never been nomadic, he’d been born with the need to visit cities — every city! — where no Spokane Indian had ever been before.
He’d shaken hands with two different Popes, waded in the Mediterranean Sea, and walked one hundred miles atop the Great Wall of China. After a solid and unspectacular college basketball career — his name had never been mentioned on ESPN’s SportsCenter—he’d played professionally in Norway, Italy, Japan, Des Moines, Russia, Hartford, Yugoslavia, Greece, Australia, Kamloops, British Columbia, Germany, France, Kalamazoo, and every other Spanish-speaking country in South America.
No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.
Every autumn for ten years, Roman had attended NBA training camps — mostly for Eastern Conference teams because he had a great jump shot and slow feet — but he’d never even played in one exhibition game, let alone a regular-season contest, a feat that would have made him the first federally recognized Indian since Jim Thorpe to play professional basketball. But it had never happened, no matter how well he’d played in training camps. He’d been cut from fifteen different NBA teams in those ten years, and had always ended up as the second-best American player on third-rate international teams.
Then, one morning, after a particularly horrid game where he’d missed fifteen straight shots and turned the ball over seven times, he’d woken up in a Hilton Hotel in Madrid, Spain, with the sure knowledge that it was time to quit basketball for good and return to the reservation.
On the morning after the first snow, Grace Atwater could hear the television playing out in the living room, could hear the replay of Michael Jordan’s famous press conference.
I’m back.
Grace knew that her husband had fallen asleep out there again. He often fell asleep on the couch, leaving her alone in the bed. She didn’t mind. He snored loudly and usually stole the covers. She smiled at the thought of her sloppy husband. He’d once been thin and beautiful.
She was a Mohawk Indian from the island of Manhattan — her father had been an iron worker who’d help build most of the New York skyline — but she’d lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation for so many years, and had spent so much time with the Spokanes, that she’d realized she was more Spokane than anything else. She’d always understood that an Indian could be assimilated and disappear into white culture, but she’d discovered, too, that an Indian of one tribe could be swallowed whole by another tribe. She was Jonah; the Spokanes were the stomach, ribs, and teeth of the whale.
I’m back.
She taught fourth grade at the Spokane Tribal School, and loved her job, though it had convinced her never to have her own children. Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn’t see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That’s what mothers told her: Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing; it’s spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true — it must be true — but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She’d known too many women who’d vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who’d magically been replaced by their children and their children’s desires. But what about the maternal instinct? Well, for eight hours a day, over the last eight years, within the four walls of a fourth-grade classroom, she’d loved one hundred and thirty-six Spokane Indian boys and girls, had loved them well and kept them safe, and had often been the only adult in their lives who’d never actively or inactively broken their hearts. How many nights had one of her former students shown up at her house and asked to be sheltered?
Still, Grace had never thought of herself as any kind of saint. More likely, she was just a good teacher; nothing wrong with that, but nothing uncommon or special about it either. She’d often wondered if she was doing everything she could to ensure the survival of the Spokanes, the Mohawks, of all Indian people. Maybe she should have given birth to a dozen indestructible Indian children, part-Mohawk, part-Spokane, and part-Kevlar. Most of her fellow Mohawks, and most members of every other tribe, were marrying white partners and conceiving fragile children. Grace knew how fractions worked; Indians were disappearing by halves. But then again, she was only half-Mohawk herself and lived three thousand miles away from her people. Her people — what an arrogant concept! They didn’t belong to her and she didn’t belong to them. She was friendly with only twenty other Mohawks, having learned long ago that she preferred the company of these Spokanes, as bitter and sarcastic as they could be. Hell, these Spokanes started fistfighting one another in first grade and only stopped punching and kicking with the arrivals of their first Social Security checks. Then those former brawlers suddenly became respected elders and clucked their tongues at the young and violent. She was convinced the Spokanes survived out of spite. After a nuclear war, the only things left standing would be Spokane Indians, cockroaches, farmers, and Michael Jordan.