What is an Indian? Is it a man with a spear in his hands?
“What about Wounded Knee?” Crowell asked my father. “I was at Wounded Knee. Where were you?”
“I was teaching my son here how to ride his bike. Took forever. And when he finally did it, man, I cried like a baby, I was so proud.”
“What kind of Indian are you? You weren’t part of the revolution.”
“I’m a man who keeps promises.”
It was mostly true. My father had kept most of his promises, or had tried to keep all of his promises, except this one: he never stopped eating sugar.
After we shared that dinner of homemade tomato soup, my father slept in his bed while I sat awake in the living room and watched the white noise of the television. My father’s kidneys and liver were beginning to shut down. Shut down. So mechanical. At that moment, if I had closed my eyes, I could have heard the high-pitched whine of my father’s engine (it was working too hard!) and the shudder of his chassis. In his sleep, he was climbing a hill (downshifting all the way!) and might not make it over the top.
At three that morning, I heard my father coughing, and then I heard him retching, gagging. I raced into his room, flipped on the light, and discovered him drenched in what I thought was blood.
“It’s the soup, it’s just the soup,” he said and laughed at the fear in my face. “I threw up the soup. It’s tomatoes, the tomatoes.”
I undressed him and washed his naked body. His skin had once been dark and taut, but it had grown pale and loose.
“You know how to get rid of tomato stains?” he asked.
“With carbonated water,” I said.
“Yeah, but how do you get rid of carbonated-water stains?”
I washed his belly, washed the skin that was blue with cold and a dozen tattoos. I washed his arms and hands. I washed his legs and penis.
“You shouldn’t have to do this,” he said, his voice cracking. “You’re not a nurse.”
What is an Indian? Is it a son who had always known where his father kept his clothes in neat military stacks?
I pulled a T-shirt over my father’s head. I slipped a pair of boxer shorts over his bandaged legs and up around his waist.
“How’s the bear?” I asked him, and he laughed until he gagged again, but there was nothing left in his stomach for him to lose. He was still laughing when I switched off the light, lay down beside him, and pulled the old quilt over us.
“You remember when I first made the tomato soup?” he asked me.
“Yeah, that summer at Ankeny’s.”
“The summer of Carla, as I recall.”
“I didn’t know you knew about her.”
“Jeez, you told everybody. That’s why she wouldn’t do it with you anymore. You hurt her feelings. You should have kept your mouth shut.”
“I had no idea.”
I wondered what would happen if I saw her again. Would she remember me with fondness or with regret?
“Before I threw up my soup, I was dreaming,” he said.
“About what?”
“I was dreaming there was a knock on the door and I got up and walked over there. I wasn’t walking on my stumps or anything. I was just sort of floating. And the knocking on the door was getting louder and louder. And I was getting mad, you know?”
I knew.
“And then I open up the door,” continued my father. “And I’m ready to yell, ready to shout, what the hell you want, right? But I don’t see anybody right away, until I look down, and there they are.”
“Your feet.”
“My feet.”
“Wow.”
“Wow, enit? Exactly. Wow. There’s my feet, my bare-ass feet just standing there on the porch.”
“They talked, enit?”
“Damn right, they talked. These little mouths opened up on the big toes, like some crazy little duet, and sang in Spanish.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“No, but they kept singing about Mexico.”
“You ever been to Mexico?”
“No. Never even been to California.”
I thought about my father’s opportunities and his failures, about the man he should have been and the man he had become. What is an Indian? Is it a man with a good memory? I thought about the pieces of my father — his children and grandchildren, his old shoes and unfinished novels — scattered all over the country. He was a man orphaned at six by his father’s soldierly death in Paris, France, and, three months later, by his mother’s cancerous fall in Spokane, Washington. I thought about my mother’s funeral and how my father had climbed into the coffin with her and how we, the stronger and weaker men of the family, had to pull him out screaming and kicking. I wondered if there was some kind of vestigial organ inside all of us that collected and stored our grief.
“Well, then, damn it,” I said. “We’re going to Mexico.”
Two hours later, my father and I sat (he couldn’t do anything but sit!) in Wonder Horse’s garage, which was really a converted old barn, while Wonder Horse and Sweetwater, reunited for this particular occasion, gave my battered van a quick tune-up.
“Hey,” said Wonder Horse. “You’ve been treating this van like it was a white man. It’s all messed up.”
Sweetwater, having returned to his usual and accustomed silence, nodded his head in agreement.
“You see,” continued Wonder Horse. “You have to treat your car with love. And I don’t mean love of an object. You see, that’s just wrong. That’s materialism. You have to love your car like it’s a sentient being, like it can love you back. Now, that’s some deep-down agape love. And you want to know why you should love your car like it can love you back?”
“Why?” asked my father and I simultaneously.
“Because it shows faith,” said Wonder Horse. “And that’s the best thing we Indians have left.”
Sweetwater pointed at Wonder Horse — a gesture of agreement, of affirmation, of faith.
I looked around Wonder Horse’s garage, at the dozens of cars and pieces of cars strewn about. Most of them would never run again and served only as depositories for spare parts.
“What about all of these cars?” I asked. “They don’t look so well loved.”
“These selfless automobiles are organ donors,” said Wonder Horse. “And there’s no greater act of faith than that.”
“I’m an organ donor,” I said. “Says so right on my driver’s license.”
“That just means you’re a potential organ donor,” said Wonder Horse. “Ain’t nothing wrong with potential, but it ain’t real until it’s real.”
“Well, you’re potentially an asshole,” I said. “With a whole lot of potential to get wider and wider.”
The four of us, we all laughed; we were Indian men enjoying one another’s company. It happens all the time.
“I mean,” said Wonder Horse. “What would you be willing to give up to ensure somebody else’s happiness?”
“That’s a big question,” said my father.
“Tell me a big answer,” said Wonder Horse, and then he asked me this: “I mean, if you could give up your feet, would you give them to your father?”
“Oh, jeez,” said my father before I could answer. “Now we’re talking about potential. What kind of goofy operation would that be? I mean, if you could really do that, you wouldn’t take away living people’s feet, enit? You’d transplant dead people’s feet.”