Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories Read online

  BLASPHEMY

  ALSO BY SHERMAN ALEXIE

  Fiction

  War Dances

  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

  Flight

  Ten Little Indians

  The Toughest Indian in the World

  Indian Killer

  Reservation Blues

  The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

  Screenplays

  The Business of Fancydancing

  Smoke Signals

  Poetry

  Face

  Dangerous Astronomy

  Il powwow della fine del mondo

  One Stick Song

  The Man Who Loves Salmon

  The Summer of Black Widows

  Water Flowing Home

  Seven Mourning Songs for the Cedar Flute I Have Yet

  to Learn to Play

  First Indian on the Moon

  Old Shirts & New Skins

  I Would Steal Horses

  The Business of Fancydancing

  BLASPHEMY

  Sherman Alexie

  Grove Press

  New York

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY FALLSAPART PRODUCTIONS, INC.

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  to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003

  or [email protected].

  “Green World” appeared in slightly different form in the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

  “Cry Cry Cry” appeared in slightly different form in The Speed Chronicles, ed. Joseph Matson, Akashic Books.

  “Idolatry” appeared in slightly different form in Narrative.

  “Fame” appeared in slightly different form in The Stranger.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9406-0

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  FOR RED GROUP, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  CONTENTS

  Cry Cry Cry

  Green World

  Scars

  The Toughest Indian in the World

  War Dances

  This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

  Midnight Basketball

  Idolatry

  Protest

  What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?

  The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

  The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor

  Indian Country

  Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only

  Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play

  “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock

  Scenes from a Life

  Breakfast

  Night People

  Breaking and Entering

  Do You Know Where I Am?

  Indian Education

  Gentrification

  Fame

  Faith

  Salt

  Assimilation

  Old Growth

  Emigration

  The Search Engine

  The Vow

  Basic Training

  What You Pawn I Will Redeem

  Acknowledgments

  CRY CRY CRY

  Forget crack, my cousin, Junior, said, meth is the new war dancer.

  World Champion, he said.

  Grand Entry, he said.

  Five bucks, he said, give me five bucks and I’ll give you enough meth to put you on a Vision Quest.

  For a half-assed Indian, Junior talked full-on spiritual. Yeah, he was a born-again Indian. At the age of twenty-five, he war-danced for the first time. Around the same day he started dealing drugs.

  I’m traditional, Junior said.

  Whenever an Indian says he’s traditional, you know that Indian is full of shit.

  But, not long after my cousin started dancing, the powwow committee chose him as Head Man Dancer because he was charming and popular. Powwow is like high school, except with more feathers and beads.

  Before he sold drugs, Junior used them. He started with speed and it made him dance for hours. Little fucker did somersaults. I’ve seen maybe three somersaulting war dancers.

  You war-dance that good, Junior said, and the Indian women will line up to braid your hair.

  No, I don’t wear rubbers, he said. I want to be God and repopulate the world.

  I wondered, since every Indian boy either looks like a girl or like a chicken with a big belly and skinny legs, how he could tell which kids were his.

  He was all sexed up from the cradle.

  He used to go to the Assembly of God, but when he was fifteen, he made a pass at the preacher’s wife. Grabbed her tit and said, I’ll save you.

  Preacher man punched my cousin in the face.

  I thought you were supposed to forgive me, Junior said.

  Preacher man packed up his clothes, books, and wife and left the rez forever. I felt sorry for the wife—who’d made good friends among the Indian women—but was happy the preacher man was gone.

  I didn’t like him teaching us how to speak tongues.

  Anyway, after the speed came the crack and it took hold of my cousin and made him jitter and shake the dust. Earthquake—his Indian name should have changed to Earthquake. Saddest thing: Powwow regalia looks great on a too-skinny Indian man.

  Then came the meth.

  Indian Health Service had already taken Junior’s top row of teeth and the meth took the bottom row.

  Use your drug money to buy some false teeth, I said.

  I was teasing him, but he went out and bought new choppers. Even put a gold tooth in front like some kind of gangster rapper wannabe. He led a gang full of reservation-Indians-who-listened-to-hardcore-rap-so-much-they-pretended-to-be-inner-city-black. Shit, we got fake Bloods fake-fighting fake Crips. But they aren’t brave or crazy enough to shoot at one another with real guns. No, they mostly yell out car windows. Fuckers are drive-by cursing.

  I heard some fake gangsters had taken to throwing government commodity food at one another.

  Yeah, my cousin was deadly as a can of cling peaches.

  And this might have gone on forever if he’d only dealt drugs on the rez and only to Indians. But he crossed the border and found customers in the white farm towns that circled us.

  Started hooking up the Future Farmers of America.

  And then he started fucking the farmers’ daughters.

  So they charged him for possession, intent to sell, and statutory rape. And I figured he deserved whatever punishment he’d get during the trial.

  Hey, Cousin, he said to me when I visited him in jail, they’re going to frame me.

  You’re guilty, I said, you did all of it, and if the cops ever ask me, I’ll tell them everything I know about your badness.

  He was m
ad at first. Talked about betrayal. But then he softened and cried.

  You’re the only one, he said, who loves me enough to tell the truth.

  But I could tell he was manipulating me. Putting the Jedi shaman mind tricks on me. But I didn’t fall for his magic.

  I do love you, I said, but I don’t love you enough to save you.

  While the lawyers and judges and jury were deciding my cousin’s future, some tribal members showed up at the courthouse to protest. They screamed and chanted about racism. They weren’t exactly wrong. Plenty of Indians have gone to jail for no good reason. But plenty more have gone to jail for the exact right reasons.

  Of course, it didn’t help that I knew half of those protestors were my cousin’s loyal customers.

  So I felt sorry for the protestors who believed in what they were doing. They were good-hearted people looking to change the system. But when you start fighting for every Indian, you end up defending the terrible ones, too.

  That’s what being tribal can do to you. It traps you in the tipi with the murderers and rapists and drug dealers. It seems everywhere you turn, some felon-in-buckskin elbows you in the rib cage.

  After a few days of trial and testimony, when things were looking way bad for my cousin, Junior plea-bargained his way to a ten-year prison sentence in Walla Walla State Penitentiary.

  Maybe out in six with good behavior. Yeah, like my cousin was capable of good behavior.

  And, oh, man was he terrified.

  You’re right to be scared, I said, but just find all the Indians and they’ll keep you safe.

  But what did I know? The only thing I’d learned about prison was what I’d seen on HBO, A&E, and MSNBC documentaries.

  Halfway through his first day in prison, my cousin got into a tussle with the big boss Indian.

  Why did you fight him? I asked.

  Because he was a white man, Junior said, as fucking pale as snow.

  My cousin wasn’t too dark himself but I guess he was dark enough.

  That fucker had blue eyes, Junior said, and you know Indians can’t be blue-eyed.

  My cousin wasn’t smart enough to know about recessive genes, but he was speaking some truth.

  But no matter how Junior felt about that white Indian, he should have kept the peace. He should have looked for the Indian hidden behind those blue eyes.

  I tried to explain myself, Junior said. I told him I was just punching the white guy in him.

  Like an exorcism, I said when Junior called me collect from the prison pay phone. I think jail is the only place where you can find pay phones anymore.

  Yeah, Junior said, I’m a devil-killer.

  But here’s the saddest thing: My cousin’s late mother was white. A blonde and blue-eyed Caucasian beauty. Yeah, my cousin is half white. He just won the genetic lottery when he got the black hair and brown eyes. His late brother had the light skin and pale eyes. We used to call them Sunrise and Sundown.

  Anyway, my cousin lost his tribal protection damn quick, and halfway through his second day in prison, he was gang-raped by black guys. And halfway through his third day, those black guys sold Junior to an Aryan dude for five cartons of cigarettes.

  One thousand cigarettes.

  It’s cruel to say, but that doesn’t seem near enough to buy somebody. If it’s going to happen to you, it should cost a lot more, right?

  But what do I know about prison economics? Maybe that was a good price. I hoped that it was a good price.

  My cousin was pretty. He had the long, black hair and the skinny legs and ass. It didn’t take much to make him look womanly. Just some mascara, lipstick, and prison pants scissored into short shorts.

  Suddenly, Junior said, I am Miss Indian USA.

  But I’m not gay, he said.

  It’s not about being gay, I said, it’s about crazy guys trying to fill you with their pain.

  Jesus, Junior said, all these years since Columbus landed and now he’s finally decided to fuck me in the ass.

  Yeah, we could laugh about it. What else were we going to do? If you sing the first note of a death song while you’re in prison, you’ll soon be singing the whole damn song every damn day.

  For the next three years, I drove down to Walla Walla to visit Junior. At first, it was once or twice a month. Then it became every few months. Then I stopped driving there at all. I accepted his collect calls for the first five years, but then I stopped doing that. And he stopped calling. He disappeared from my life.

  Some things happen. Some things don’t.

  My cousin served his full ten-year sentence, was released on a Monday, and had to hitchhike back to the reservation.

  He showed up at the tribal cafe as I was eating an overcooked hamburger and too-greasy fries. He sat in the chair across the table from me and smiled big and shiny. New false teeth. Looked like he got one good thing out of prison.

  Hey, Cousin, he said.

  He was way casual for a guy who’d been in prison for ten years and hadn’t heard from me in five.

  So, I said, are you really free or did you break out?

  It was a hot summer day, but Junior was wearing long sleeves to cover his track marks. He’d graduated from meth to heroin.

  We restarted our friendship You could call us cousin-brothers or cousin–best friends. Either works. Both work. He never mentioned my absence from his prison life and I wasn’t about to bring it up.

  He got a job working forestry. It was easy work for decent money. Nobody on the rez was interested in punishing the already-punished.

  It’s a good job, he said, I drive through all the deep woods on the rez and mark trees that I think should be cut down.

  Thing is, he said, we never cut down any trees, so my job is really just driving through the most beautiful place in the world while carrying a box full of spray paint.

  He fell in love, too, with Jeri, a white woman who worked as a nurse at the Indian Health Service Clinic. She was round and red-faced, but funny and cute and all tender in the heart, and everybody on the rez liked her. So it felt like a slice of redemption pie.

  She listens to me, Junior said. You know how hard that is to find?

  Yeah, I said, but do you listen to her?

  Junior shrugged his shoulders. Of course he didn’t listen to her. He’d been forced to keep his mouth shut for ten years in prison. It was his turn to talk. And talk he did.

  He told me everything about how he sexed her up. Half of me wanted to hear the stories and half of me wanted to close my ears. But I couldn’t stop him. I felt guilty for abandoning him in prison. I owed him patience and grace.

  But it was so awful sometimes. He was already sex-drunk and half-mean when he went into prison, but being treated as a fuck-slave for ten years turned him into something worse. I don’t have a name for it, but he talked about sex like he talked about speed and meth and crack and heroin.

  She’s my pusher, he said about Jeri, and her pussy is my drug.

  He reduced Jeri all the way down to the sacred parts of her anatomy. And those parts stop being sacred when you talk blasphemy about them.

  Maybe he wasn’t in love with Jeri, I thought. Maybe he was time-traveling her back to prison with him.

  But I also wondered what Jeri was doing with him. From the outside, she looked solid and real, but I think she was broken inside and, for some crazy reason, thought that broken men could fix her.

  Things went on like that for a couple of years. He started punching her in the stomach. She hid those bruises beneath her clothes. And she punched him and gave him black eyes that Junior carried around like war paint.

  We are Romeo and Juliet, he said.

  Yeah, like he’d ever read the book or watched any of those movies more than ten minutes through.

  Then, one day, Jeri disappeared.

  Rumor had it she went into a battered women’s shelter. Rumor also had it she was hiding in Spokane. Which, if true, was stupid. How can you hide in the City of Spokane from a Spokane Indian?
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  Six months after she went missing, Junior found her in a 7-Eleven in the Indian part of town.

  Yeah, scared as she was of one Indian, she was hiding among other Indians. Yeah, we Indians are addicting. You have to be careful around us because we’ll teach you how to cry epic tears and you’ll never want to stop.

  Anyway, you might think he wanted to kill her. Or break some bones. But, no, he was crazy in a whole different way. In the aisle of that 7-Eleven, he dropped to his knees and asked for her hand in marriage.

  So, yes, they got married and I was the best man.

  In the parking lot after the ceremony, Junior and Jeri smoked meth with a bunch of toothless wonders.

  Fucking zombies walking everywhere on the rez.

  Monster movie all the time.

  A thousand years from now, archaeologists are going to be mystified by all the toothless skulls they find buried in the ancient reservation mud.

  Junior and Jeri couldn’t afford a honeymoon so they spent a night in the tribal casino hotel. That’s free for any Indian newlyweds. Mighty generous, I guess, letting tribal members sleep free in the casino they’re supposed to own.

  They moved into a trailer house down near Tshimakain Creek and they got all happy and safe for maybe six months.

  Then, one night, after she wouldn’t have sex with him, he punched her so hard that he knocked out her front teeth.

  That was it for her.

  She left him and lived on the rez in plain sight. All proud for leaving, she mocked him by carrying her freedom around like her own kind of war paint. And I loved her for it.

  Stand up, woman, I thought, stand up and kick out your demons.

  Junior seemed to accept it okay. I should’ve known better, but he talked a good line.

  The world is an imperfect place, he said. I don’t know where he got that bit of philosophy but he seemed to believe it.

  Then Jeri fell in love with Dr. Bob. He was the general practitioner who also worked at the Indian clinic and was counting the days until he paid off his scholarship and could flee the rez. In the meantime, he’d found a warm body to keep him company during the too-damn-many-Indians night.

  Everybody deserves love. Well, almost everybody deserves love. And Jeri certainly needed some brightness, but Dr. Bob was all dark and bitter and accelerated. He punched her in the face on their eleventh date.