Later that day, I lifted my father from the passenger seat of my van, a Ford with more than two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. My father carried sixty-five years on his odometer and had lost forty pounds in the last few months. I carried him easily over to his electric wheelchair (purchased for five hundred dollars from a white woman whose paraplegic husband had died) and set him in the worn leather seat. He looked so frail that I wondered if he had the strength to move the joystick that powered the chair.
“Can you make it?” I asked.
Of course he could. He was a man who used to teach ballroom dancing, back when he was young and strong and financing his communications education at the University of Washington (he’d always meant to start his own radio station on the reservation). He was the man who had taught me how to waltz about fifteen minutes before I’d left to pick up my date for the high school prom. I’d always wondered how we looked: two tall Indian men, father and son, spinning around the living room of a reservation HUD house.
My father guided the wheelchair up the ramp. I wasn’t nervous about its construction. I trusted Sweetwater and Wonder Horse. I knew the ramp would hold.
“Sweet and Wonder?” asked my father, using the nicknames only men of a certain generation were allowed to use.
“Yeah,” I said. “But they got in a fight about Jesus. I don’t think they’re on speaking terms now.”
“They’re like an old married couple, enit?”
“They’ll kiss and make up.”
“They always do.”
My mother had died ten years earlier from a brain tumor. She had been a librarian, a lover of books. By the end of her life, she could no longer speak, let alone read, so she had no last words from her deathbed, only the slow blinking of her eyes, and then the fading of the light behind them. It had been a quiet death for a woman with such a large vocabulary.
I followed my father and his chair into the house. He had not been here in some weeks and so was surprised to see the amount of home improvement I had done myself or had paid others to do. Or rather, he was surprised at the improvements he could see, since his vision was impaired by the blood that flowed from the broken veins in his eyes. The walls were painted a fresh white, a new carpet had replaced the twenty-five-year-old shag, and family photographs were fitted with new frames. Cosmetic changes, really, but my father acted as if I’d built him a mansion.
“You’re good to me,” he said. I didn’t know if that was completely true, or if it had ever been true, even in part.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said. “I’m not going to live long enough to get it ugly again.”
“Hey,” I said. “They always underestimate Indians. You’re going to make it until next Christmas, at least. You eat better and you’ll see Paul graduate high school.”
Paul was my son. He lived with his Lummi Indian mother in Seattle, exactly two hundred and seventy-nine miles from my house in Spokane. She’d remarried a white man who made a lot more money than I did. He was a consultant for one thing or another — one of those jobs that only white guys seem to get. Consultant. He consulted. Others paid him to consult. They wanted to be consulted. He wanted to consult. All around me, white men were consulting other white men. My son lived with a consultor, or was it spelled differently? Did my son live with a consulter? The whole world could live in the space between that o and that e. My son lived in that space. My son asked another man for consultation. He was an Indian consultantee loved fiercely by a white consultant. Sure, my vocabulary was bitter (She’d chosen somebody over me!) but I was happy the white man, the stepfather, was able to provide my son with a better life than I would have on my high school English teacher’s salary. And I was happy that my son was living in Seattle, where twenty percent of the city was brown-skinned, instead of Spokane, where ninety-nine percent of the people were white. I’m not exactly racist. I like white people as a theory; I’m just not crazy about them in practice. But, all in all, ours was a good divorce. I still loved my ex-wife, without missing her or our marriage (I’m a liar), and spent every other weekend, all of the major holidays, and most of the minor ones, with the three of them in Seattle — all of us having decided to make it work, as the therapists had said. The nontraditional arrangement, this extended family, was strange when measured by white standards, but was very traditional by Indian standards. What is an Indian? Is it a child who can stroll unannounced through the front doors of seventeen different houses?
“How long before Paul graduates?” asked my father as we stood (I was the only one standing!) in our house. No, it wasn’t my house anymore. Only my ghost lived there now.
“Nine months,” I said. “In June.”
“Six to five against me making it.”
He always knew the odds. He’d always been a gambler and had lost more than one paycheck to the horses and the dogs and the Sonics and the Seahawks and the Mariners and the dice and the playing cards.
“I’ll bet twenty bucks you make it,” I said.
“I expect you to throw that Andrew Jackson in the coffin with me.”
“I expect you to buy me lunch in July.”
He wheeled himself into his bedroom at the back of the house. I hadn’t changed anything about his personal space, knowing that he would have resented the invasion.
“What did you do in here?” he asked.
“Can’t you tell?” I asked.
“Son, I’m mostly blind in one eye and I can’t see much out of the other.”
“Everything is the same,” I said (I lied) and wondered how long it would be before his vision left him forever.
His room had been the same for the last ten years, since my mother’s death. (His wife! His wife! Of course, that’s how he remembered her!) The same ratty chair, the same bookshelf overflowing with the same books, the same bed with the same two-by-fours holding it together. I’d been conceived in that bed, or so the legend goes. Of course, according to my father, I’d also been conceived in the front and/or backseat (and trunk!) of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu; in a telephone booth in downtown Seattle; on the seventeenth floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Minneapolis; on the living room couch during halftime of a Duke-North Carolina basketball game; in a powwow tepee in Browning, Montana; and amid the broken eggs and expired milk of a 7-Eleven walk-in freezer in Phoenix, Arizona.
I missed my mother like crazy. During all of my childhood bedtimes, she’d read me books (Whitman! Dickinson!) I could not understand and would not understand until many years later.
What is an Indian? Is it a boy who can sing the body electric or a woman who could not stop for death?
My siblings, three brothers and two sisters, were scattered in the indigenous winds, all of them living on somebody else’s reservation with lovers whose blood came from a dozen different tribes. I’d lost track of the number of nieces and nephews I had, but I didn’t feel too guilty about that because I’m quite sure that my brothers had also lost track of the number of kids they’d helped conceive (the Fathers of our Country!).
Though I didn’t see my siblings much, perhaps two or three times a year at family and tribal gatherings, we’d always been happy to see one another and had easily fallen back into our comfortable patterns: hugs, kisses, genial insults, then the stories about our mother, and finally the all-night games of Scrabble. None of us had ever found the need to chastise any of the others for our long absences from each other. We’d all pursued our very different versions of the American Dream (the Native American Dream!) and had all been successful to one degree or another. We were teacher, truck driver, logger, accountant, preacher, and guitar player. Our biggest success: we were all alive. Our biggest claim to fame: we were all sober.