“That’s sad and beautiful,” she said. “You’re sad and beautiful.” She reached over and brushed a stray hair away from his face. Tender gestures.
“I was raised by my grandmother,” he said. “My mom and dad, they were killed in a house fire. My two sisters died in the fire, too. I was the only one who lived. I was a baby when the fire happened. Somebody, they don’t know whether it was my mom or dad, threw me out a window, and I landed in a tree. At first they thought I’d burned up in the fire with everyone else, but a fireman found me sleeping high up in that tree.”
“That’s just it, man,” she said. “That’s how it happens. That’s how pain visits, man. You break somebody’s heart two hundred years ago, and it’s like this chain reaction, man. Hearts keep on getting broken. Oh, Harlan, you’re breaking my heart.”
She hugged him. She kissed him on the cheek. She kissed him on the mouth. He pushed her down and climbed on top of her. She reached down and helped him put his penis inside her. But he felt passive and removed from the act.
“Put your pain into me,” she said. “I can take it. I need it. I deserve it.”
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He knew some folks got off on being punished, on being degraded during sex. But he’d never made love to a woman who wanted him to take revenge against her for hundreds of years of pain she never caused. Who could make love with that kind of historical and hysterical passion? He laughed.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s so funny?”
“I don’t know, I’m scared, I’m scared,” he said. It was always good to admit your fear, or to pretend you were afraid. Women loved men who confessed their fears and doubts, however real or imaginary they might be.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” she said. “Give me everything you are.”
He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t want to see the need in her eyes, and he didn’t want her to see the deceit in his eyes. So he flipped her over onto her stomach and pushed into her from behind. She moaned loudly, louder than she had before, reached back and under and played with herself while he pumped in and out, in and out. He looked down at the back of her head, her face buried in the pillow, and he understood she could be any white woman. This wasn’t a new and exciting position, a bid for a different kind of intimacy, or carnal experimentation. He wanted her to be faceless and anonymous because he was faceless and anonymous. He didn’t know her real name, and she didn’t know his.
“Give it to me,” she said. “I’m here for you, I’m here for you, I’m here for you.”
He felt like a ghost watching a man make love to a woman, and he wondered how a man could completely separate his body from his soul. Can women separate themselves like that? Of course they must be able to. They must have to. Star Girl was not making love to him. She was making love to an imaginary man. His body was inside her body, but who was he inside her mind? Am I her father? Am I her brother, her mother, her sister? Or am I only her Indian?
He flipped her over onto her back and penetrated her again. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and she closed her eyes.
“Look at me,” he said.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. She smiled. How could she smile? She was a stranger with strange ideas.
“Say my name,” he said.
“Harlan,” she said.
She was wrong and didn’t know she was wrong.
“Say my name,” he said again.
“Harlan,” she said. “Harlan Atwater.”
He pulled out of her and crawled off the bed. He ignored her as he quickly dressed, and then he ran out the door, away from her. He ran to the house he shared with his white parents, grabbed the box filled with his self-printed poetry books, and ran back out into the world. He ran twenty-two blocks to Big Heart’s, the Indian bar on Aurora. He threw open the door and strode into the crowded bar like a warrior chief.
“I am a poet!” he screamed to the assembled Indians.
The drunken Indians, those broken men and women, let Harlan be their poet for the night. They let him perform his poems between jukebox songs. They listened and applauded. They hugged and kissed him. They told him his poems sounded exactly like Indian poems were supposed to sound. They recited their poems to him, and asked if their poems were as good as his poems, and he said they were very good, very good, so keep working on them. They all wanted copies of his books. Harlan was so happy he gave them away for free. He autographed 275 books and gave them to 275 different Indians. They all bought him drinks. He didn’t need their charity. He had money. But he wanted to be part of their tribe, their collective, so he drank the free drinks, and he laughed and sang and danced and performed his poems again and again. And yes, he could recite all of them by memory because he loved his poems so much. He asked them if he was Indian, and they said he was the best Indian they’d ever known, and he was happy to hear it, so he drank the free drinks and bought drinks for others, and they all drank together, completely forgetting who had paid for what. He drank more, and the lights and faces blurred, and he could see only one bright red light, and then he could see nothing at all.
Harlan woke the next morning in the alley behind the bar. He staggered to his feet, retched, and emptied his stomach onto a pile of his poetry books lying on the dirty cement. Dry-heaving, he knelt, cleaned his vomit off his books, and read the inscriptions inside:
To Junior, my new best friend, Love, Harlan
To Agnes! Indian Power! From Harlan!
To Hank, who fought in the Nam and don’t give a damn, Harlan
To Pumpkin, who always remembers the elders, Always, Harlan
To Dee, the rodeo queen, from the rodeo king, Harlan
Carrying the damp books, Harlan staggered down the alley and onto the street. Sunrise. The street was empty of cars and people, but Harlan could see a dozen of his books lying abandoned on the street. He knew hundreds of others were lying on hundreds of other streets. Harlan dropped the books he carried, let them join the rest of their tribe, and walked home to his parents.
In the used-book store, Corliss covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t look at the world where such a sad thing could take place.
“Shoot, that’s the thing,” Harlan said. “That’s why I was so surprised to hear one of my books was in the library. In the end, I didn’t write poems. I wrote litter.”
He laughed. Corliss wondered how he could laugh. But she laughed with him and didn’t know why. What was so funny about the world? Everything! Corliss and Harlan laughed until the hearing-impaired bookstore owner probably felt the floor shake.
“So, what lessons can we learn from this story?” Corliss asked.
“Never autograph books for drunk Indians,” he said.
“Never have sex with women named after celestial bodies.”
“Never self-publish your poetry.”
“Never perform at open-mike nights.”
“Never pretend to be an Indian when you’re not,” he said. He took off his glasses and wiped tears from his eyes. Two Indians crying in the back of a used-book store. Indians are always crying, Corliss thought, but at least we’re two Indians crying in an original venue. What kind of ceremony was that? An original ceremony! Every ceremony has to be created somewhere; her Eden was a used-book store. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was on sale at the local bookstore. That was only natural, she thought, it was apt and justified and ordained. Again, she felt blessed and chosen. She felt young and epic. Can one be young and epic? She didn’t know, but she’d gladly be the first such adventurer, or second, or thirty-third, or one millionth. She was Odysseus, and Harlan was Homer. Or vice versa.
“I never wrote another poem after that night,” Harlan said. “It seemed indecent.”
“I think poetry writing is supposed to feel indecent.”
“Well, maybe. You’re young. I was young, too. And I made a lot of fuss about some fairly inconsequential poems. It’s not like I was famous or rich or talented. I was ordinary, or maybe a little better than ordinary, and I wanted to be more than that, and I couldn’t be, and it hurt for a long time. I think writing poems, I think if I would’ve kept writing them, I would’ve always been reminded of that, of how ordinary I am.”
Corliss wondered what sort of person could continue working jobs that made him feel ordinary. But everybody worked those jobs. Corliss didn’t believe there was a huge difference between the average pizza deliveryman’s self-esteem and Clint Eastwood’s. Or maybe she only wanted to believe there was no real difference. How do small people feel larger? Well, silly, they pretend the large people are smaller. In an ideal world, Corliss thought, everybody weighs 150 pounds!
“Can I ask you a human question?” she asked.
“What’s a human question?” he asked.
“A homeless guy taught me the phrase. I think it’s a variation on a personal question.”
“You’re a strange, strange woman,” he said.
She couldn’t disagree.
“All right,” he said. “Go ahead. Ask away.”
“What have you been doing all these years?”
“I still drive a forklift down on the waterfront. Nothing spectacular. I’m going to retire at the end of the year. I’ve got a big pension coming. It’s good money, honest work, I guess, as long as I don’t think too hard about what’s in the boxes, you know?”
Corliss knew about denial.
“And I take care of my folks,” he said. “I still live with them in the house. That’s why I didn’t let you in. They’re old and sick. They took care of me then. I take care of them now.”
“Were they good parents?” she asked.
“Better than most, I suppose,” he said. “But the thing is, shoot, they could have completely ignored me, and it wouldn’t have mattered much. Because they saved my life. I mean, I know they’re white and I’m Indian, and that’s supposed to be such a sad-sack story, but well, they did, they really saved my life.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, shoot,” he said. “I went looking for my real mother once. And it took me a few years, but I found her. She was living alone in Los Angeles. Living in some downtown dive hotel, and she was smoking crack, you know? That’s what my real mother was doing the first time I saw her. I was sitting in my car outside that hotel, because it was scary, you know? And I saw this old Indian woman walking down the street, walking with a cane, and her face was all swollen, and her legs were all swollen. And she had all these sores all over her arms and legs and face. And she looked like a zombie, you know? Like Stephen King’s nightmare Indian.”
“How’d you know it was your mother?” Corliss asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just knew. I mean, she looked like me. I looked like her. But there was something else, too. I felt connected. And she started coughing. I was parked fifty feet away, but I could hear her coughing so loud. She was retching up stuff and spitting it on the sidewalk. And it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. And this was my mother. This was the woman who gave birth to me, who’d left me behind. I felt sorry for her and loved her and hated her all at the same time, you know?”
Corliss knew about mothers and their difficult love.
“I opened the door and got out. I was going to walk across the street and stop her and say to her—I’d rehearsed it all—I was going to say, ‘Mother, I am your son.’ Basic, simple, clean. Nothing dramatic. Still, I thought even that simple statement might kill her. I keep thinking I might shock her into a heart attack, she looked so frail and weak. I’m walking across the street toward her, and she’s coughing, and I’m getting closer, and then she reaches into her pocket, pulls out this crack pipe and a lighter, and she lights up right there in the middle of the street. Broad daylight. She lights up and sucks the crap in. And I kept walking right past her, came within a foot of her, you know. I could smell her. She didn’t even look at me. She just kept sucking at that pipe. Old Indian woman sucking on a crack pipe. It was sad and ridiculous, but you know the worst part?”
“What?” Corliss asked.
Harlan stood and walked down the aisle away from Corliss. He spoke with his back to her.
“I was happy to see my mother like that,” he said. “I was smiling when I walked away from her. I just kept thinking how lucky I was, how blessed, that this woman didn’t raise me. I just kept thinking God had chosen me, had chosen these two white people to swoop in and save me. Do you know how terrible it is to feel that way? And how good it feels, too?”
“I don’t have any idea how you feel,” Corliss said. Her confusion was the best thing she could offer. What could she say to him that would matter? She’d spent her whole life talking. Words had always been her weapon, her offense and defense, and she felt that her silence, her wordlessness, might be the only thing she could give him.
“The thing is,” he said, “the two best, the two most honorable and loyal people in my life are my white mother and my white father. So, you tell me, kid, what kind of Indian does that make me?”
Corliss knew only Harlan could answer that question for himself. She knew the name of her tribe, and the name of her archaic clan, and her public Indian name, and her secret Indian name, but everything else she knew about Indians was ambiguous and transitory.