And even though my mother didn’t want to be married to him anymore and his wreck didn’t change her mind about that, she still came to see him every day. She sang Indian tunes under her breath, in time with the hum of the machines hooked into my father. Although my father could barely move, he tapped his finger in rhythm.
When he had the strength to finally sit up and talk, hold conversations, and tell stories, he called for me.
“Victor,” he said. “Stick with four wheels.”
After he began to recover, my mother stopped visiting as often. She helped him through the worst, though. When he didn’t need her anymore, she went back to the life she had created. She traveled to powwows, started to dance again. She was a champion traditional dancer when she was younger.
“I remember your mother when she was the best traditional dancer in the world,” my father said. “Everyone wanted to call her sweetheart. But she only danced for me. That’s how it was. She told me that every other step was just for me.”
“But that’s only half of the dance,” I said.
“Yeah,” my father said. “She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain’t healthy.”
“You know,” I said, “sometimes you sound like you ain’t even real.”
“What’s real? I ain’t interested in what’s real. I’m interested in how things should be.”
My father’s mind always worked that way. If you don’t like the things you remember, then all you have to do is change the memories. Instead of remembering the bad things, remember what happened immediately before. That’s what I learned from my father. For me, I remember how good the first drink of that Diet Pepsi tasted instead of how my mouth felt when I swallowed a wasp with the second drink.
Because of all that, my father always remembered the second before my mother left him for good and took me with her. No. I remembered the second before my father left my mother and me. No. My mother remembered the second before my father left her to finish raising me all by herself.
But however memory actually worked, it was my father who climbed on his motorcycle, waved to me as I stood in the window, and rode away. He lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, before he finally ended up in Phoenix. For a while, I got postcards nearly every week. Then it was once a month. Then it was on Christmas and my birthday.
On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation can work.
My mother did her best to explain it all to me, although I understood most of what happened.
“Was it because of Jimi Hendrix?” I asked her.
“Part of it, yeah,” she said. “This might be the only marriage broken up by a dead guitar player.”
“There’s a first time for everything, enit?”
“I guess. Your father just likes being alone more than he likes being with other people. Even men and you.”
Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She’d get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt.
On those nights I missed him most I listened to music. Not always Jimi Hendrix. Usually I listened to the blues. Robert Johnson mostly. The first time I heard Robert Johnson sing I knew he understood what it meant to be Indian on the edge of the twenty-first century, even if he was black at the beginning of the twentieth. That must have been how my father felt when he heard Jimi Hendrix. When he stood there in the rain at Woodstock.
Then on the night I missed my father most, when I lay in bed and cried, with that photograph of him beating that National Guard private in my hands, I imagined his motorcycle pulling up outside. I knew I was dreaming it all but I let it be real for a moment.
“Victor,” my father yelled. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“I’ll be right down. I need to get my coat on.”
I rushed around the house, pulled my shoes and socks on, struggled into my coat, and ran outside to find an empty driveway. It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away. I stood on the porch and waited until my mother came outside.
“Come on back inside,” she said. “It’s cold.”
“No,” I said. “I know he’s coming back tonight.”
My mother didn’t say anything. She just wrapped me in her favorite quilt and went back to sleep. I stood on the porch all night long and imagined I heard motorcycles and guitars, until the sun rose so bright that I knew it was time to go back inside to my mother. She made breakfast for both of us and we ate until we were full.
SCENES FROM A LIFE
Thirty-one years ago, just after I’d graduated from college, I had sex with a teenage Indian boy. I was twenty-three and the boy was seventeen. In the State of Washington, the age of consent is sixteen, but since I was more than five years older than him and in a supervisory position, I was guilty of sexual misconduct, though my crime was never discovered.
I don’t think I was a predator. It was only the third time I’d slept with somebody, but the boy told me he’d already had sex with twelve different girls.
“I’m a champion powwow fancydancer,” he said. “And fancy-dancers are the rock stars of the Indian world. We have groupies.”
Please don’t think I’m trying to justify my actions. But I’m fairly certain that I didn’t hurt that Indian boy, either physically or spiritually. At least, I hope that he remembers me with more fondness than pain.
I was a middle-class white girl who’d volunteered to spend a summer on an Indian reservation. Any Indian reservation. I foolishly thought that Indians needed my help. I was arrogant enough to think they deserved my help.
My Indian boy was poor and learning-disabled, and he could barely read, but he was gorgeous and strong and kind and covered his mouth when he laughed, as if he were embarrassed to be enjoying the world. I was slender and pretty, and eager to lift him out of poverty, and so ready to save his life, but ended up naked in a wheat field with him.
The sex didn’t last long. And I cried afterward.
“Your skin is so pretty and pale,” he said. “Thank you for letting me touch you.”
He was a sweet and poetic boy for somebody so young. We held each other tightly and didn’t let go even as the ants crawled on us.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They won’t bite us.”
And they didn’t.
I’m not a Catholic but I would still like to make this official confession: I feel great shame for what I did to that boy. But do you know what makes it worse? I don’t remember his name.
Three years ago, I was living in a prefurnished corporate apartment in Phoenix, Arizona. You’ve heard of the company I work for. You probably own many of its products.
It was July and the sand invaded my apartment and car and mouth. All day long, I swigged and gargled water to clean the grit from between my teeth.
My coworkers didn’t get sand in their teeth so they thought I was imagining it. They teased me and wondered if the heat was driving me crazy. I wondered if they were correct.
I was born and grew up on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula between a rain forest and a saltwater strait. My parents loved the place so much that they named me BlueGrouse, a bird only found in our rain forest. Lucky me. So, of course, as soon as I turned eighteen, I legally changed my first name to Melissa, the second most common one in the United States that year. In partial honor of my parents, I did keep Blue, but lopped off Grouse, as my middle name.
In any event, a woman originally named for a slug-eating bird doesn’t belong in the desert.
One morning late in July, the temperature was already over 100 degrees at dawn. And, minute by minute, it was only getting hotter. I could have hidden in the air-conditioned apartment, but I’d felt the need to challenge myself. I wanted to see how long I could endure that heat.
I was dizzy after a few minutes. And I was so thirsty that everything—the buildings, cars, and mountains—glistened like bottles of water.
And then I saw it.
To the east of the city. And approaching fast.
A massive wave of sand.
It stretched hundreds of feet into the air. And it was at least thirty miles wide.
All around me, my neighbors—none of whom I knew but who must have been watching the morning news—had stepped out onto their decks to stare.
“What is that?” one neighbor shouted to nobody in particular.
“A haboob,” somebody else shouted.
“What’s a haboob?”
“It’s Arabic.”
“Okay, it’s Arabic, but what does it mean?”
“The rough translation is ‘big fucking sandstorm.’”
As it rolled closer, the haboob swallowed the city. I wondered if it was strong enough to destroy buildings. Could the sand be propelled with such force that it stripped metal from cars and skin from humans?
I imagined that a million people—sudden skeletons—were buried and would remain so until an archaeologist discovered them centuries from now.
My neighbors fled back into their apartments, but I remained on my deck and waited for the storm. I welcomed it. But as the wind blew down power lines and exploded a few transformers, I was forced to retreat and watch the storm through the sliding glass door until a fine layer of dust obscured my view.
Later, after the skies had cleared and the electricity had been restored, and the mayor had announced that the city had sustained only minor damage, I remained in my dark apartment and stared at the sliding door. The dust had rearranged itself into ambiguous shapes and lines. It seemed to have formed letters of a strange alphabet. I wondered if God was punishing me by sending a message that I couldn’t read.
I’ve been a member of eleven book clubs in the last twenty years. I’ve read approximately one hundred novels during that time and I’ve enjoyed maybe half of them.
While reading books, I write notes in the page margins and I circle and memorize certain lines and passages. The people in each book might be different, but the plotline is basically the same: Somebody is unhappy and they do dangerous and foolish things trying to become happy.
I’ve been married and divorced twice. No kids. I’m quite positive that I’ll marry and divorce the next man who whispers my name.
Like I said, dangerous and foolish.
In my thirties, I made documentaries.
Or rather, I was the script supervisor for many documentary filmmakers. I kept things organized. I kept track of camera angles, dialogue errors, and continuity. If an actor picked up an apple in the first take, then I made sure she picked up an apple in each subsequent take.
In the old days, they called them script girls. These days, the script supervisors are still mostly women. But nobody comments on that. Not aloud.
I didn’t get paid much, but I enjoyed the privilege of traveling the country.
One autumn, I worked with a director making a short film about cranberry bogs in Wisconsin. He was a soft-spoken white man and he spent most of his time and budget interviewing the Indians who worked the bogs.
“What is the magic in cranberries?” he asked the Indians again and again. And they’d laugh at him. Or they’d say, “There’s nothing magical. It’s just a good job, if you don’t mind getting wet.” One old Indian woman said, “Aren’t cranberries supposed to muscle up your bladder so you pee good?” The director, desperately hoping for a new answer, would rephrase his question in a dozen different ways.
In bed, after good sex, he’d stare at the ceiling and chastise the Indians and himself.
“They don’t trust me,” he said. “I’m just another white guy with a camera. If I were an Indian, I wouldn’t trust me. Do you trust me?”
“Of course not,” I said. He was married and had three kids. I’ve never understood why mistresses fall in love with their married lovers. And I really don’t understand those mistresses who steal away husbands from their wives and children. Why would you want to destroy marriages and families and friendships? I’ve always thought the hottest thing about affairs was the secrecy.
“But I know these Indians think cranberries are magical,” the director said. “They just don’t want to share the magic. But I respect the magic. I want the world to respect the magic.”
He was a calm and kind man. He never lost his temper, but he so desperately wanted the Indians to answer his questions with spiritual force. He wanted the Indians to think of themselves as more than just blue-collar workers.
But they were blue-collar workers, and they were strong and scarred, and many of them made passes at me. I was tempted by a few of them, especially this muscular man with long black braids. His skinny butt looked great in his Wrangler jeans. But I politely declined all offers because I knew I couldn’t hop into bed with an Indian man without thinking of that Indian boy from my past. Even though I’m what the prigs would call promiscuous, I believe in making love to one man at a time. I didn’t want to have a threesome with a real person and a ghost.
On the last day of shooting, the director gathered up all of the Indian bog workers—a few dozen men and women—and organized them for a group shot. Just as he was about to film them waist-deep in a bog, they started laughing. No, they were giggling. And that made me giggle, too. I don’t think there’s anything funnier than a crowd of big Indians giggling so hard that they cry.