Ten Little Indians: Stories Page 18

“The most money anybody has made in one day is five hundred and twenty-five. And that’s because somebody gave Old Blue five hundred-dollar bills for some dang reason. The average daily net is about thirty dollars.”

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “No.”

  “Can you lend me some money?”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “If I lend you money, I have to lend money to everybody.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I’ll give you fifty papers for free. But don’t tell anybody I did it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He gathered up the newspapers and handed them to me. I held them to my chest. He hugged me. I carried the newspapers back toward the water.

  5:00 P.M.

  Back on the wharf, I stood near the Bainbridge Island Terminal and tried to sell papers to business commuters walking onto the ferry.

  I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five into a garbage can, and walked into the McDonald’s, ordered four cheeseburgers for a dollar each, and slowly ate them.

  After eating, I walked outside and vomited on the sidewalk. I hated to lose my food so soon after eating it. As an alcoholic Indian with a busted stomach, I always hope I can keep enough food in my stomach to stay alive.

  6:00 P.M.

  With one dollar in my pocket, I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out, so I put my ear to his chest and listened for his heartbeat. He was alive, so I took off his shoes and socks and found one dollar in his left sock and fifty cents in his right sock. With two dollars and fifty cents in my hand, I sat beside Junior and thought about my grandmother and her stories.

  When I was sixteen, my grandmother told me a story about World War II. She was a nurse at a military hospital in Sydney, Australia. Over the course of two years, she comforted and healed U.S. and Australian soldiers.

  One day, she tended to a wounded Maori soldier. He was very dark-skinned. His hair was black and curly, and his eyes were black and warm. His face was covered with bright tattoos.

  “Are you Maori?” he asked my grandmother.

  “No,” she said. “I’m Spokane Indian. From the United States.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I have heard of your tribes. But you are the first American Indian I have ever met.”

  “There’s a lot of Indian soldiers fighting for the United States,” she said. “I have a brother still fighting in Germany, and I lost another brother on Okinawa.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I was on Okinawa as well. It was terrible.” He had lost his legs to an artillery attack.

  “I am sorry about your legs,” my grandmother said.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What’s funny?”

  “How we brown people are killing other brown people so white people will remain free.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Well, sometimes I think of it that way. And other times, I think of it the way they want me to think of it. I get confused.”

  She fed him morphine.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” he asked.

  “Which heaven?” she asked.

  “I’m talking about the heaven where my legs are waiting for me.”

  They laughed.

  “Of course,” he said, “my legs will probably run away from me when I get to heaven. And how will I ever catch them?”

  “You have to get your arms strong,” my grandmother said. “So you can run on your hands.”

  They laughed again.

  Sitting beside Junior, I laughed with the memory of my grandmother’s story. I put my hand close to Junior’s mouth to make sure he was still breathing. Yes, Junior was alive, so I took his two dollars and fifty cents and walked to the Korean grocery store over in Pioneer Square.

  7:00 P.M.

  In the Korean grocery store, I bought a fifty-cent cigar and two scratch lottery tickets for a dollar each. The maximum cash prize was five hundred dollars a ticket. If I won both, I would have enough money to buy back the regalia.

  I loved Kay, the young Korean woman who worked the register. She was the daughter of the owners and sang all day.

  “I love you,” I said when I handed her the money.

  “You always say you love me,” she said.

  “That’s because I will always love you.”

  “You are a sentimental fool.”

  “I’m a romantic old man.”

  “Too old for me.”

  “I know I’m too old for you, but I can dream.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I agree to be a part of your dreams, but I will only hold your hand in your dreams. No kissing and no sex. Not even in your dreams.”

  “Okay,” I said. “No sex. Just romance.”

  “Good-bye, Jackson Jackson, my love, I will see you soon.”

  I left the store, walked over to Occidental Park, sat on a bench, and smoked my cigar all the way down.

  Ten minutes after I finished the cigar, I scratched my first lottery ticket and won nothing. So I could win only five hundred dollars now, and that would be just half of what I needed.

  Ten minutes later, I scratched my other lottery ticket and won a free ticket, a small consolation and one more chance to win money.

  I walked back to Kay.

  “Jackson Jackson,” she said. “Have you come back to claim my heart?”

  “I won a free ticket,” I said.

  “Just like a man,” she said. “You love money and power more than you love me.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “And I’m sorry it’s true.”

  She gave me another scratch ticket, and I carried it outside. I liked to scratch my tickets in private. Hopeful and sad, I scratched that third ticket and won real money. I carried it back inside to Kay.

  “I won a hundred dollars,” I said.

  She examined the ticket and laughed. “That’s a fortune,” she said and counted out five twenties. Our fingertips touched as she handed me the money. I felt electric and constant.

  “Thank you,” I said and gave her one of the bills.

  “I can’t take that,” she said. “It’s your money.”

  “No, it’s tribal. It’s an Indian thing. When you win, you’re supposed to share with your family.”

  “I’m not your family.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  She smiled. She kept the money. With eighty dollars in my pocket, I said good-bye to my dear Kay and walked out into the cold night air.

  8:00 P.M.

  I wanted to share the good news with Junior. I walked back to him, but he was gone. I later heard he had hitchhiked down to Portland, Oregon, and died of exposure in an alley behind the Hilton Hotel.

  9:00 P.M.

  Lonely for Indians, I carried my eighty dollars over to Big Heart’s in South Downtown. Big Heart’s is an all-Indian bar. Nobody knows how or why Indians migrate to one bar and turn it into an official Indian bar. But Big Heart’s has been an Indian bar for twenty-three years. It used to be way up on Aurora Avenue, but a crazy Lummi Indian burned that one down, and the owners moved to the new location, a few blocks south of Safeco Field.

  I walked inside Big Heart’s and counted fifteen Indians, eight men and seven women. I didn’t know any of them, but Indians like to belong, so we all pretended to be cousins.

  “How much for whiskey shots?” I asked the bartender, a fat white guy.

  “You want the bad stuff or the badder stuff?”

  “As bad as you got.”

  “One dollar a shot.”

  I laid my eighty dollars on the bar top.

  “All right,” I said. “Me and all my cousins here are going to be drinking eighty shots. How many is that apiece?”

  “Counting you,” a woman shouted from behind me, “that’s five shots for everybody.”

  I turned to look at her. She was a chubby and pale Indian sitting with a tall and skinny Indian man.

  “All right, math genius,” I said to her and then shout
ed for the whole bar to hear. “Five drinks for everybody!”

  All of the other Indians rushed the bar, but I sat with the mathematician and her skinny friend. We took our time with our whiskey shots.

  “What’s your tribe?” I asked them.

  “I’m Duwamish,” she said. “And he’s Crow.”

  “You’re a long way from Montana,” I said to him.

  “I’m Crow,” he said. “I flew here.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked them.

  “I’m Irene Muse,” she said. “And this is Honey Boy.”

  She shook my hand hard, but he offered his hand like I was supposed to kiss it. So I kissed it. He giggled and blushed as well as a dark-skinned Crow can blush.

  “You’re one of them two-spirits, aren’t you?” I asked him.

  “I love women,” he said. “And I love men.”

  “Sometimes both at the same time,” Irene said.

  We laughed.

  “Man,” I said to Honey Boy. “So you must have about eight or nine spirits going on inside of you, enit?”

  “Sweetie,” he said, “I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”

  “Oh, no,” Irene said. “Honey Boy is falling in love.”

  “It has nothing to do with love,” he said.

  We laughed.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’m flattered, Honey Boy, but I don’t play on your team.”

  “Never say never,” he said.

  “You better be careful,” Irene said. “Honey Boy knows all sorts of magic. He always makes straight boys fall for him.”

  “Honey Boy,” I said, “you can try to seduce me. And Irene, you can try with him. But my heart belongs to a woman named Kay.”

  “Is your Kay a virgin?” Honey Boy asked.

  We laughed.

  We drank our whiskey shots until they were gone. But the other Indians bought me more whiskey shots because I’d been so generous with my money. Honey Boy pulled out his credit card, and I drank and sailed on that plastic boat.

  After a dozen shots, I asked Irene to dance. And she refused. But Honey Boy shuffled over to the jukebox, dropped in a quarter, and selected Willie Nelson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” As Irene and I sat at the table and laughed and drank more whiskey, Honey Boy danced a slow circle around us and sang along with Willie.

  “Are you serenading me?” I asked him.

  He kept singing and dancing.

  “Are you serenading me?” I asked him again.

  “He’s going to put a spell on you,” Irene said.

  I leaned over the table, spilling a few drinks, and kissed Irene hard. She kissed me back.

  10:00 P.M.

  Irene pushed me into the women’s bathroom, into a stall, shut the door behind us, and shoved her hand down my pants. She was short, so I had to lean over to kiss her. I grabbed and squeezed her everywhere I could reach, and she was wonderfully fat, and every part of her body felt like a large, warm, and soft breast.

  Midnight

  Nearly blind with alcohol, I stood alone at the bar and swore I’d been standing in the bathroom with Irene only a minute ago.

  “One more shot!” I yelled at the bartender.

  “You’ve got no more money!” he yelled.

  “Somebody buy me a drink!” I shouted.

  “They’ve got no more money!”

  “Where’s Irene and Honey Boy?”

  “Long gone!”

  2:00 A.M.

  “Closing time!” the bartender shouted at the three or four Indians still drinking hard after a long hard day of drinking. Indian alcoholics are either sprinters or marathon runners.

  “Where’s Irene and Honey Bear?” I asked.

  “They’ve been gone for hours,” the bartender said.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “I told you a hundred times, I don’t know.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “It’s closing time. I don’t care where you go, but you’re not staying here.”

  “You are an ungrateful bastard. I’ve been good to you.”

  “You don’t leave right now, I’m going to kick your ass.”

  “Come on, I know how to fight.”

  He came for me. I don’t remember what happened after that.

  4:00 A.M.

  I emerged from the blackness and discovered myself walking behind a big warehouse. I didn’t know where I was. My face hurt. I touched my nose and decided it might be broken. Exhausted and cold, I pulled a plastic tarp from a truck bed, wrapped it around me like a faithful lover, and fell asleep in the dirt.

  6:00 P.M.

  Somebody kicked me in the ribs. I opened my eyes and looked up at a white cop.

  “Jackson,” said the cop. “Is that you?”

  “Officer Williams,” I said. He was a good cop with a sweet tooth. He’d given me hundreds of candy bars over the years. I wonder if he knew I was diabetic.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I was cold and sleepy,” I said. “So I laid down.”

  “You dumb-ass, you passed out on the railroad tracks.”

  I sat up and looked around. I was lying on the railroad tracks. Dockworkers stared at me. I should have been a railroad-track pizza, a double Indian pepperoni with extra cheese. Sick and scared, I leaned over and puked whiskey.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Officer Williams asked. “You’ve never been this stupid.”

  “It’s my grandmother,” I said. “She died.”

  “I’m sorry, man. When did she die?”

  “1972.”

  “And you’re killing yourself now?”

  “I’ve been killing myself ever since she died.”

  He shook his head. He was sad for me. Like I said, he was a good cop.

  “And somebody beat the hell out of you,” he said. “You remember who?”

  “Mr. Grief and I went a few rounds.”

  “It looks like Mr. Grief knocked you out.”

  “Mr. Grief always wins.”

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s get you out of here.”

  He helped me stand and led me over to his squad car. He put me in the back. “You throw up in there,” he said, “and you’re cleaning it up.”

  “That’s fair,” I said.

  He walked around the car and sat in the driver’s seat. “I’m taking you over to detox,” he said.

  “No, man, that place is awful,” I said. “It’s full of drunk Indians.”

  We laughed. He drove away from the docks.

  “I don’t know how you guys do it,” he said.

  “What guys?” I asked.

  “You Indians. How the hell do you laugh so much? I just picked your ass off the railroad tracks, and you’re making jokes. Why the hell do you do that?”

  “The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”

  We laughed.

  “Listen to you, Jackson. You’re so smart. Why the hell are you on the streets?”

  “Give me a thousand dollars, and I’ll tell you.”

  “You bet I’d give you a thousand dollars if I knew you’d straighten up your life.”

  He meant it. He was the second-best cop I’d ever known.

  “You’re a good cop,” I said.

  “Come on, Jackson,” he said. “Don’t blow smoke up my ass.”

  “No, really, you remind me of my grandfather.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you Indians always tell me.”

  “No, man, my grandfather was a tribal cop. He was a good cop. He never arrested people. He took care of them. Just like you.”

  “I’ve arrested hundreds of scumbags, Jackson. And I’ve shot a couple in the ass.”

  “It don’t matter. You’re not a killer.”

  “I didn’t kill them. I killed their asses. I’m an ass-killer.”

  We drove through downtown. The missions and shelters had alr
eady released their overnighters. Sleepy homeless men and women stood on corners and stared up at the gray sky. It was the morning after the night of the living dead.

  “Did you ever get scared?” I asked Officer Williams.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, being a cop, is it scary?”

  He thought about that for a while. He contemplated it. I liked that about him.

  “I guess I try not to think too much about being afraid,” he said. “If you think about fear, then you’ll be afraid. The job is boring most of the time. Just driving and looking into dark corners, you know, and seeing nothing. But then things get heavy. You’re chasing somebody or fighting them or walking around a dark house and you just know some crazy guy is hiding around a corner, and hell yes, it’s scary.”

  “My grandfather was killed in the line of duty,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. How’d it happen?”

  I knew he’d listen closely to my story.

  “He worked on the reservation. Everybody knew everybody. It was safe. We aren’t like those crazy Sioux or Apache or any of those other warrior tribes. There’s only been three murders on my reservation in the last hundred years.”

  “That is safe.”

  “Yeah, we Spokane, we’re passive, you know? We’re mean with words. And we’ll cuss out anybody. But we don’t shoot people. Or stab them. Not much, anyway.”

  “So what happened to your grandfather?”

  “This man and his girlfriend were fighting down by Little Falls.”

  “Domestic dispute. Those are the worst.”

  “Yeah, but this guy was my grandfather’s brother. My great-uncle.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah, it was awful. My grandfather just strolled into the house. He’d been there a thousand times. And his brother and his girlfriend were all drunk and beating on each other. And my grandfather stepped between them just like he’d done a hundred times before. And the girlfriend tripped or something. She fell down and hit her head and started crying. And my grandfather knelt down beside her to make sure she was all right. And for some reason, my great-uncle reached down, pulled my grandfather’s pistol out of the holster, and shot him in the head.”