I’m back.
Inside their small house, Grace listened as Roman stood from the couch and walked into the bathroom. He sat down to piss. She thought that Roman’s sit-down pisses were one of the most romantic and caring things that any man had ever done for any woman.
After the piss, Roman pulled up his underwear, climbed into a pair of sweatpants hanging from the shower rod, slipped his feet into Chuck Taylor basketball shoes, and stepped into the bedroom.
Grace pretended to be asleep in their big bed, warm and safe beneath seven generations of sheets, blankets, and quilts. She was a big woman with wide hips, thick legs, large breasts, and a soft stomach. She was deep brown and beautiful.
Still holding the basketball, Roman leaned close to Grace, his face just inches away from hers.
“There’s a strange woman in my bed,” said Roman.
“I know,” said Grace, without opening her eyes.
“What should I do about her?”
“Let her sleep.”
Roman touched the basketball to Grace’s cheek.
“Michael Jordan is coming back again,” he said.
“You can’t fool me,” said Grace. “I heard it. That was just a replay.”
“Yeah, but I wish he was coming back again. He should always come back.”
“Don’t let it give you any crazy ideas.”
Roman pulled the basketball away and leaned even closer to Grace. His lips were brushing against her ear.
“It snowed last night,” he whispered.
“I can smell it,” said Grace.
“What do you want for breakfast?”
“Make me some of your grandma’s salmon mush.”
Roman made the mush in the way he’d been taught to make it. Then he brought the mush, along with two slices of toast, a cup of coffee, and the morning newspaper, to Grace and watched her eat breakfast in bed.
Up until her death, Grandmother Fury had been the very last Spokane Indian who knew how to make salmon mush in the way that Spokane Indians had been making salmon mush for the last hundred years or so. In terms of the entire tribal history, salmon mush was a recent addition to the traditional cuisine — just as human beings were among the most recent life-forms on the whole planet — but salmon mush was a singular and vitally important addition. After all, Grandmother Fury’s own grandmother had served salmon mush to Chief Joseph just a few days before he led the Nez Perce on their heroic and ultimately failed thousand-mile flight from the Ninth Cavalry. Though he was captured and sent to the prison of some other tribe’s reservation, Joseph praised the salmon mush he’d eaten and often hinted that the strange combination of fish, oats, and milk was the primary reason why he’d nearly led his people into the wild freedom of Canada.
Nine decades later, on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Grandmother Fury said a prayer for Joseph and stirred a few more slices of smoked salmon into the pot of oats boiling on her woodstove. At that point, many cooks would have poured in the milk and brought it all back to the boil. But Grandmother Fury was cousin to salmon and knew their secrets. She poured the ice-cold milk over the boiling salmon and oats just a few seconds before serving. In that collision between heat and cold, between mammal and fish, between liquid and solid, there was so much magic that Grandmother Fury trembled as she set a bowl in front of her grandson and watched him eat.
“It’s good,” said Roman. He was eighteen years old and lovely in his grandmother’s eyes.
“But you haven’t even tasted it,” she said, in Spokane, the tribal language.
“Don’t have to,” said Roman in English. “I believe in your mush more than I believe in God.”
“You liar,” she said in Spokane and laughed.
“Yes,” he said in English. “But it’s a good lie.”
Grandmother and grandson sat in the small kitchen of her home — their home! — and found no need to speak to each other. Because they were Indians, they gave each other room to think, to invent the next lie, joke, story, compliment, or insult. He ate; she watched.
That afternoon, Roman was going to take the Colonial Aptitude Test, his college boards, and hoped to score high enough to get into college, any college. He was the first member of his extended family who’d even wanted to pursue higher education. In fact, there were only a couple of dozen Spokane Indians who’d ever graduated from any four-year university and only a few more than that who’d bothered to attend even the smallest community college.
A few small colleges had offered full basketball scholarships to Roman, but he’d turned them down. He wanted to attend the best school possible, whether he played basketball for them or not.
“You know,” Grandmother Fury said in rough English, in careful and clumsy syllables, after Roman had finished one bowl of mush and started in on another. “Those college tests, they’re not for Indians.”
Roman nodded his head. He knew the Colonial Aptitude Test was culturally biased, but he also knew the CAT was supposed to be culturally biased. The CAT was designed to exclude from college as many poor people as statistically possible. Despite the rumors of democracy and fairness, Roman knew, when it came to the CAT, that meritocracy was to college as fish was to bicycle. He knew the CAT was an act of war. As a result, Roman wasn’t approaching the test with intellect and imagination. He was going to attack it with all of the hatred and anger in his heart.
“I’m afraid,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” she said in Spokane.
“I don’t want to be afraid.”
“Yes, I know,” she said in English.
With tears in his eyes and a salty taste at the back of his throat, Roman finished another bowl of salmon mush and asked for another.
“Yes,” said his grandmother. She said, “Yes.”
Three months later, Roman Gabriel Fury sat in the waiting room of the Colonial Aptitude Testing Service office in Spokane, Washington. He held two letters in his hands. One letter congratulated him on his exceptional CAT performance. The other letter requested his presence for a special meeting with the president of the Colonial Aptitude Testing Service.
Nervous and proud, Roman wondered if he was going to be given a special commendation, a reward for such a high score, unusually high for anybody, let alone an Indian boy who’d attended a reservation high school without chemistry, geometry, or foreign-language classes.
Sitting in the CAT office, in that small city named after his tribe, Roman wore his best suit, his only suit, a JCPenney special that his father had purchased for him four years earlier. Roman’s father was a poor and generous man who had given his son many things over the years, mostly inexpensive trinkets whose only value was emotional, but the JCPenney suit was expensive, perhaps the most expensive gift that Roman had ever received, certainly more valuable than being named after a professional quarterback who had some Indian blood, or the rumor of Indian blood. Young Roman had often wished his father had given him the name of the other professional Indian quarterback, Sonny Six Killer, the one who had demonstrable Indian blood. Roman Gabriel Fury often wished that his name was Sonny Six Killer Fury. With a name like that, Roman knew that he could have become a warrior.