Ten Little Indians Read online

  “I am kind because you are kind. Thank you for sharing your story.”

  “Thank you for showing me some respect. I need respect.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. She knew this man would talk to her for days. She knew he’d fall in love with her and steal everything she owned if given the chance. And she knew he might be lying to her about everything. He might be an illiterate heroin addict with a gift for gab. But he was also a man who could and would give her directions.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I really have to get moving. Can you tell me where this address is?”

  “I’m sorry you have to leave me. But I understand. I was born to be left and bereft. Still, I made a human promise to you, and I will keep it, as a human. This address is on the other side of the Space Needle. Walk directly toward the Space Needle, pass right beneath it, keep walking to the other side of the Seattle Center, and you’ll find this address somewhere close to the McDonald’s over there.”

  “You know where all the McDonald’s are?”

  “Yes, humans who eat fast food feel very guilty about eating it. And guilty people are more generous with their money and time.”

  Corliss bought him a chicken sandwich and another chocolate shake and then left him alone.

  She walked toward the Space Needle, beneath it, and beyond it. She wondered if the homeless professor had sent her on a wild-goose chase, or on what her malaproping auntie called a dumb-duck run. But she saw that second McDonald’s and walked along the street until she found the address she was looking for. There, at that address, was a tiny, battered, eighty-year-old house set among recently constructed condominiums and apartment buildings. If Harlan Atwater had kept the same phone number for thirty-three years, Corliss surmised, then he’d probably lived in the same house the whole time, too. She wasn’t searching for a nomad who had disappeared into the wilds. She’d found a man who had stayed in one place and slowly become invisible. If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile? Corliss was afraid of confronting the man in person. What if he was violent? Or worse, what if he was boring? She walked into the second McDonald’s, ordered a Diet Coke, and sat at the window and stared at Harlan Atwater’s house. She studied it.

  Love Song

  I have loved you during the powwow

  And I have loved you during the rodeo.

  I have loved you from jail

  And I have loved you from Browning, Montana.

  I have loved you like a drum and drummer

  And I have loved you like a holy man.

  I have loved you with my tongue

  And I have loved you with my hands.

  But I haven’t loved you like a scream.

  And I haven’t loved you like a moan.

  And I haven’t loved you like a laugh.

  And I haven’t loved you like a sigh.

  And I haven’t loved you like a cough.

  And I haven’t loved you well enough.

  After two more Diet Cokes and a baked apple pie, Corliss walked across the street and knocked on the door. A short, fat Indian man answered.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He wore thick glasses, and his black hair needed washing. Though he was a dark-skinned Indian, one of the darker Spokanes she’d ever seen, he also managed to look pasty. Dark and pasty, like a chocolate doughnut. Corliss was angry with him for being homely. She’d hoped he would be an indigenous version of Harrison Ford. She’d wanted Indiana Jones and found Seattle Atwater.

  “Are you just going to stand there?” he asked. “If you don’t close your mouth, you’re going to catch flies.”

  He was fifty or sixty years old, maybe older. Old! Of course he was that age. He’d published his book thirty years ago, but Corliss hadn’t thought much about the passage of time. In her mind, he was young and poetic and beautiful. Now here he was, the Indian sonneteer, the reservation bard, dressed in a Seattle Super Sonics T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “Yo, kid,” he said. “I don’t have all day. What do you want?”

  “You’re Harlan Atwater,” she said, hoping he wasn’t.

  He laughed. “Dang,” he said. “You’re that college kid. You don’t give up, do you?”

  “I’m on a vision quest.”

  “A vision quest?” he asked and laughed harder. “You flatter me. I’m just a smelly old man.”

  “You’re a poet.”

  “I used to be a poet.”

  “You wrote this book,” she said and held it up for him.

  He took it from her and flipped through it. “Man,” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy of this in a long time.”

  He remembered. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

  “You don’t have one?” she asked.

  “No,” he said and silently read one of the sonnets. “Dang, I was young when I wrote these. Too young.”

  “You should keep that one.”

  “It’s a library book.”

  “I’ll pay the fine.”

  “This book means more to you than it means to me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have found me. You should keep it and pay the fine.”

  He handed the book back to her. He laughed some more.

  “I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “I’m not trying to belittle you. But I can’t believe that little book brought you here.”

  “I’ve never read a book of Indian poems like that.”

  She started to cry and furiously wiped her tears away. She cried too easily, she thought, and hated how feminine and weak it appeared to be. No, it wasn’t feminine and weak to cry, not objectively speaking, but she still hated it.

  “Nobody’s cried over me in a long time,” he said.

  “You know,” she said, “I came here because I thought you were something special. I read your poems, and some of them are really bad, but some of them are really good, and maybe I can’t always tell the difference between the good and the bad. But I know somebody with a good heart wrote them. Somebody lovely wrote them. And now I look at you, and you look terrible, and you sound terrible, and you smell terrible, and I’m sad. No, I’m not sad. I’m pissed off. You’re not supposed to be like this. You’re supposed to be somebody better. I needed you to be somebody better.”

  He shook his head, sighed, and looked as if he might cry with her.

  “I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “But I am who I am. And I haven’t written a poem in thirty years, you know? I don’t even remember what it feels like to write a poem.”

  “Why did you quit writing poems?” she asked. She knew she sounded desperate, but she was truly desperate, and she couldn’t hide it. “Nobody should ever quit writing poems.”

  “Jesus, you’re putting me in a spot here. All right, all right, we’ll have a talk, okay? You’ve come this far, you deserve to hear the truth. But not in my house. Nobody comes in my house. Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll meet you over to the McDonald’s.”

  “I’ve already been in that McDonald’s.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t like to go to the same place twice in the same day. Especially since I was just there.”

  “That’s a little bit crazy.”

  “I’m a little bit crazy.”

  He liked that.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll meet you down to the used-book store. You can see it there at the corner.”

  “You read books?”

  “Just because I quit writing doesn’t mean I quit reading. For a smart kid, you’re kind of dumb, you know?”

  That pleased her more than she’d expected. He was still a smart-ass, so maybe he was still rowdy enough to write poems. Maybe there was hope for him. She felt evangelical. Maybe she could save him. Maybe she’d pray for him and he’d fall to his knees in the bookstore and beg for salvation and resurrection.

  “All right?” he asked. “About fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He closed the door. For a moment, she wondered if
he was tricking her, if he needed a way to close the door on her. Well, he’d have to call the cops to get rid of her. She’d camp on his doorstep until he came out. She’d wait in the bookstore for exactly seventeen minutes, and if he was one second later, she’d break down his front door and interrogate him. He was an out-of-shape loser and she could take him. She’d teach him nineteen different ways to spell matriarchy.

  She hurried to the bookstore and walked inside. An elderly woman was crocheting behind the front desk.

  “Can I help you?” the yarn woman asked.

  “I’m just waiting for somebody,” Corliss said.

  “A young man, perhaps?”

  Why were young women always supposed to be waiting for young men? Corliss didn’t like young men all that much. Or old men, either. She was no virgin. She’d slept with three boys and heavily petted a dozen more, but she’d also gone to bed with one woman and French-kissed the holy-moly out of another, and hey, maybe that was the way to go. Maybe I’m not exactly a lesbian, Corliss thought, but I might be an inexact lesbian.

  “Is there a man waiting at home for you?” Corliss asked and immediately felt like a jerk.

  “Oh, no,” the yarn woman said and smiled. “My husband died twenty years ago. If he’s waiting for me, he’s all the way upstairs, you know?”

  “I’m sorry,” Corliss said and meant it.

  “It’s okay, dear, I shouldn’t have invaded your privacy. You go on ahead and look for what you came for.”

  On every mission, there is a time to be strong and a time to be humble.

  “Listen, my name is Corliss Joseph, and I’m sorry for being such a bitch. There’s no excuse for it. I’m really angry with the guy I’m supposed to be meeting here soon. He’s not my boyfriend, or even my friend, or anything like that. He’s a stranger, but I thought I knew him. And he disappointed me. I don’t even think I have a right to be angry with him. So I’m really confused about—Well, I’m confused about my whole life right now. So I’m sorry, I really am, and I’m usually a much kinder person than this, you know?”

  The yarn woman was eighty years old. She knew.

  “My name is Lillian, and thank you for being so honest. When your friend, or whatever he is, arrives, I’ll turn off my hearing aids so you’ll have privacy.”

  Who would ever think of such an eccentric act of kindness? An old woman who owned a bookstore!

  “Thank you,” Corliss said. “I’ll just look around until he gets here.”

  She walked through the bookstore that smelled of musty paper and moldy carpet. She scanned the shelves and read the names of authors printed on the spines of all the lovely, lovely books. She loved the smell of new books, sure, but she loved the smell of old books even more. She thought old books smelled like everybody who’d ever read them. Possibly that was a disgusting thought, and it certainly was a silly thought, but Corliss felt like old books were sentient beings that listened and remembered and passed judgment. Oh, God, I’m going to cry again, Corliss thought, I’m losing my mind in a used-book store. I am my mother’s daughter. And that made her laugh. Hey, she thought, I’m riding in the front car of the crazy-woman roller coaster.

  She knew she needed to calm down. And to calm down, she needed to perform her usual bookstore ceremony. She found the books by her favorite authors—Whitman, Shapiro, Jordan, Turcotte, Plath, Lourie, O’Hara, Hershon, Alvarez, Brook, Schreiber, Pawlak, Offutt, Duncan, Moore—and reshelved them with their front covers facing outward. The other books led with their spines, but Corliss’s favorites led with their chests, bellies, crotches, and faces. The casual reader wouldn’t be able to resist these books now. Choose me! Choose me! The browser would fall in love at first sight. Corliss, in love with poetry, opened Harlan Atwater’s book and read one more sonnet:

  Poverty

  When you’re poor and hungry

  And love your dog

  You share your food with him.

  There is no love like his.

  When you’re poor and hungry

  And your dog gets sick,

  You can’t afford to take him

  To the veterinarian,

  So you have to watch him get sicker

  And cough blood and cry all night.

  You can’t afford to put him gently to sleep

  So your uncle comes over for free

  And shoots your dog twice in the head

  And buries him in the town dump.

  How could he know such things about poverty and pain if he had not experienced them? Can a poet be that accomplished a liar? Can a poet invent history so well that his audience is completely fooled? Only if they want to be fooled, thought Corliss, knowing she was exactly that kind of literate fool. For her, each great book was the Holy Bible, and each great author was a prophet. Oh, God, listen to me, Corliss thought, I’m a cult member. If Sylvia Plath walked into the bookstore and told her to drink a glass of cyanide-laced grape juice, Corliss knew she would happily do it.

  Precisely on time, Harlan Atwater opened the door and stepped into the bookstore. He’d obviously showered and shaved, and he wore a navy blue suit that had fit better ten years and twenty pounds earlier but still looked decent enough to qualify as formal wear. He’d replaced his big clunky glasses with John Lennon wire frames. Corliss felt honored by Harlan’s sartorial efforts and was once again amazed by Lillian as she smiled and turned off her hearing aids.

  “You look good,” Corliss said to Harlan.

  “I look like I’m trying to look good,” he said. “That’s about all I can do right now. I hope it’s enough.”

  “It is. Thank you for trying.”

  “Well, you know, it’s not every day I’m the object of a vision quest.”

  “Everything feels new today.”

  He smiled. She didn’t know what he was thinking.

  “So,” he said. “Do you want to hear my story?”

  “Yes.”

  He led her to a stuffed couch in the back of the store. They sat together. He stared at the floor as he talked.

  “I’m not really a Spokane Indian,” he said.

  She knew it! He was a fraud! He was a white man with a good tan!

  “Well, I’m biologically a Spokane Indian,” he said. “But I wasn’t raised Spokane. I was adopted out and raised by a white family here in Seattle.”

  That explained why he knew so much about Spokane Indians but remained unknown by them.

  “You’re a lost bird,” she said.

  “Is that what they’re calling us now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, isn’t that poetic? I suppose it’s better than calling us stolen goods. Or clueless bastards.”

  “But your poems, they’re so Indian.”

  “Indian is easy to fake. People have been faking it for five hundred years. I was just better at it than most.”

  She knew Indians were obsessed with authenticity. Colonized, genocided, exiled, Indians formed their identities by questioning the identities of other Indians. Self-hating, self-doubting, Indians turned their tribes into nationalistic sects. But who could blame us our madness? Corliss thought. We are people exiled by other exiles, by Puritans, Pilgrims, Protestants, and all of those other crazy white people thrown out of a crazier Europe. We who were once indigenous to this land must immigrate into its culture. I was born one mile south and raised one mile north from the place on the Spokane River where the very first Spokane Indian was ever born, and I somehow feel like a nomad, so Harlan Atwater must feel completely lost.

  “Maybe you’re faking,” she said. “But the poems aren’t fake.”

  “Do you write?” he asked.

  “Only academic stuff,” she said. “I’m kind of afraid of writing poems.”

  “Why?”

  “No matter what I write, a bunch of other Indians will hate it because it isn’t Indian enough, and a bunch of white people will like it because it’s Indian. Do you know what I mean? If I wrote poems, I’d feel trapped.”

 
Harlan had been waiting for years to talk about his traps.

  “I started writing poems to feel like I belonged,” he said. “To feel more Indian. And I started imagining what it felt like to grow up on the reservation, to grow up like an Indian is supposed to grow up, you know?”

  She knew. She wasn’t supposed to be in college and she wasn’t supposed to be as smart as she was and she wasn’t supposed to read the books she read and she wasn’t supposed to say the things she said. She was too young and too female and too Indian to be that smart. But I exist, she shouted to the world, and my very existence disproves what my conquerors believe about this world and me, but since my conquerors cannot be contradicted, I must not exist.

  “Harlan,” she said. “I don’t even know what Indian is supposed to be. How could you know?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “I wrote those poems because I wanted to know. They weren’t statements of fact, I guess. They were more like questions.”

  “But Harlan, that’s what poetry is for. It’s supposed to be about questions, about the imagination.”

  “I know, I know. The thing is, I mean, I started reading these poems, asking these questions, around town, you know? At the coffee shops and bookstores and open-mike nights. Late sixties, early seventies, shoot, it was a huge time for poetry. People don’t remember it like that, I guess. But poetry was huge. Poets were rock stars. And I was, like, this local rock star, you know? Like a garage-band poet. And people, white people, they really loved my poems, you know? They looked at me onstage, looking as Indian as I do, with my dark skin and long hair and big nose and cheekbones, and they didn’t know my poems were just pretend. How could they know? Shoot, half the white people in the crowd thought they were Indian, so why were they going to question me?”

  Corliss reached across and took his hand. She hoped he wouldn’t interpret it as a sexual gesture. But he didn’t seem to notice or acknowledge her touch. He was too involved with his own story. He was confessing; she was his priest.