Normally, Rowdy would have absolutely murdered anybody who dared to laugh at him.
But this was not a normal day.
"It's all your fault," he said.
"What's my fault?" I asked.
"Your sister is dead because you left us. You killed her."
That made me stop laughing. I suddenly felt like I might never laugh again.
Rowdy was right.
I had killed my sister.
Well, I didn't kill her.
But she only got married so quickly and left the rez because I had left the rez first. She was only living in Montana in a cheap trailer house because I had gone to school in Reardan. She had burned to death because I had decided that I wanted to spend my life with white people.
It was all my fault.
"I hate you!" Rowdy screamed. "I hate you! I hate you!"
And then he jumped up and ran away.
Rowdy ran!
He'd never run away from anything or anybody. But now he was running.
I watched him disappear into the woods.
I wondered if I'd ever see him again.
The next morning, I went to school. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to sit at home all day and talk to a million cousins. I knew my mother would be cooking food for
everybody and that my father would be hiding out in his bedroom again.
I knew everybody would tell stories about Mary.
And the whole time, I'd be thinking, "Yeah, but have you ever heard the story about how I killed my sister when I left the rez?"
And the whole time, everybody would be drinking booze and getting drunk and stupid
and sad and mean. Yeah, doesn't that make sense? How do we honor the drunken death of a young married couple?
HEY, LET'S GET DRUNK!
Okay, listen, I'm not a cruel bastard, okay? I know that people were very sad. I knew that my sister's death made everybody remember all the deaths in their life. I know that death is never added to death; it multiplies. But still, I couldn't I stay and watch all of those people get drunk. I couldn't do it. If you'd given me a room full of sober Indians, crying and laughing and telling stories about my sister, then I would have gladly stayed and joined them in the ceremony.
But everybody was drunk.
Everybody was unhappy.
And they were drunk and unhappy in the same exact way.
So I fled my house and went to school. I walked through the snow for a few miles until a white BIA worker picked me up and delivered me to the front door.
I walked inside, into the crowded hallways, and all sorts of boys and girls, and teachers, came up and hugged me and slapped my shoulder and gave me little punches in the belly.
They were worried for me. They wanted to help me with my pain.
I was important to them.
I mattered.
Wow.
All of these white kids and teachers, who were so suspicious of me when I first arrived, had learned to care about me. Maybe some of them even loved me. And I'd been so suspicious of them. And now I care about a lot of them. And loved a few of them.
Penelope came up to me last.
She was WEEPING. Snot ran down her face and it was still sort of sexy.
"I'm so sorry about your sister," she said.
I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask you how it
feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?
Remembering
Today my mother, father, and I went to the cemetery and cleaned graves.
We took care of Grandmother Spirit, Eugene, and Mary.
Mom had packed a picnic and Dad had brought his saxophone, so we made a whole day
of it.
We Indians know how to celebrate with our dead.
And I felt okay.
My mother and father held hands and kissed each other.
"You can't make out in a graveyard," I said.
"Love and death," my father said. "It's all love and death."
"You're crazy," I said.
"I'm crazy about you," he said.
And he hugged me.
And he hugged my mother.
And she had tears in her eyes.
And she held my face in her hands.
"Junior," she said. "I'm so proud of you."
That was the best thing she could have said.
In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang on to the good and sober
moments tightly.
I was happy. But I still missed my sister, and no amount of love and trust was going to make that better.
I love her. I will always love her.
I mean, she was amazing. It was courageous of her to leave the basement and move to
Montana. She went searching for her dreams, and she didn't find them, but she made the attempt.
And I was making the attempt, too. And maybe it would kill me, too, but I knew that
staying on the rez would have killed me, too.
It all made me cry for my sister. It made me cry for myself.
But I was crying for my tribe, too. I was crying because I knew five or ten or fifteen more Spokanes would die during the next year, and that most of them would die because of booze.
I cried because so many of my fellow tribal members were slowly killing themselves and
I wanted them to live. I wanted them to get strong and get sober and get the hell off the rez.
It's a weird thing.
Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto
reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.
But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps.
I wept because I was the only one who was brave and crazy enough to leave the rez. I
was the only one with enough arrogance.
I wept and wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I
was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world.
I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream.
I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.
And the tribe of cartoonists.
And the tribe of chronic masturbators.
And the tribe of teenage boys.
And the tribe of small-town kids.
And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.
And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.
And the tribe of poverty.
And the tribe of funeral-goers.
And the tribe of beloved sons.
And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends.
It was a huge realization.
And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay.
But it also reminded me of the people who were not going to be okay.
It made me think of Rowdy.
I missed him so much.
I wanted to find him and hug him and beg him to forgive me for leaving.
Talking About Turtles
The reservation is beautiful.
I mean it.
Take a look.
There are pine trees everywhere. Thousands of ponderosa pine trees. Millions. I guess
maybe you can take pine trees for granted. They're just pine trees. But they're tall and thin and green and brown and big.
Some of the pines are ninety feet tall and more than three hundred years old.
Older than the United States.
Some of them were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president.
Some of them were alive when George Washington was president.
Some of them were alive when Benjam
in Franklin was born.
I'm talking old.
I've probably climbed, like, one hundred different trees in my lifetime. There are twelve in my backyard. Another fifty or sixty in the small stand of woods across the field. And another twenty or thirty around our little town. And a few way out in the deep woods.
And that tall monster that sits beside the highway to West End, past Turtle Lake.
That one is way over one hundred feet tall. It might be one hundred and fifty feet tall.
You could build a house using just the wood from that tree.
When we were little, like ten years old, Rowdy and I climbed that sucker.
It was probably stupid. Yeah, okay, it was stupid. It's not like we were lumberjacks or anything. It's not like we used anything except our hands, feet, and dumb luck.
But we weren't afraid of falling that day.
Other days, yeah, I'm terrified of falling. No matter how old I get, I think I'm always going to be scared of falling. But I wasn't scared of gravity on that day. Heck, gravity didn't even exist.
It was July. Crazy hot and dry. It hadn't rained in, like, sixty days. Drought hot. Scorpion hot. Vultures flying circles in the sky hot.
Mostly Rowdy and I just sat in my basement room, which was maybe five degrees cooler
than the rest of the house, and read books and watched TV and played video games.
Mostly Rowdy and I just sat still and dreamed about air-conditioning.
"When I get rich and famous," Rowdy said, "I'm going to have a house that has an air conditioner in every room."
"Sears has those big air conditioners that can cool a whole house," I said.
"Just one machine?" Rowdy asked.
"Yeah, you put it outside and you connect it through the air vents and stuff."
"Wow, how much does that cost?"
"Like, a few thousand bucks, I think."
"I'll never have that much money."
"You will when you play in the NBA."
"Yeah, but I'll probably have to play pro basketball in, like, Sweden or Norway or Russia or something, and I won't need air-conditioning. I'll probably live in, like, an igloo and own reindeer or something."
"You're going to play for Seattle, man."
"Yeah, right."
Rowdy didn't believe in himself. Not much. So I tried to pump him up.
"You're the toughest kid on the rez," I said.
"I know," he said.
"You're the fastest, the strongest."
"And the most handsome, too."
"If I had a dog with a face like yours, I'd shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards."
"I once had a zit that looked like you. Then I popped it. And then it looked even more like you."
"This one time, I ate, like, three hot dogs and a bowl of clam chowder, and then I got diarrhea all over the floor, and it looked like you."
"And then you ate it," Rowdy said.
We laughed ourselves silly. We laughed ourselves sweaty.
"Don't make me laugh," I said. "It's too hot to laugh."
"It's too hot to sit in this house. Let's go swimming."
"Where?"
"Turtle Lake."
"Okay," I said.
But I was scared of Turtle Lake. It was a small body of water, maybe only a mile around.
Maybe less. But it was deep, crazy deep. Nobody has ever been to the bottom. I'm not a very good swimmer; so I was always afraid I'd sink and drown, and they'd never, ever find my body.
One year, these scientists came with a mini-submarine and tried to find the bottom, but the lake was so silty and muddy that they couldn't see. And the nearby uranium mine made their radar/sonar machines go nuts, so they couldn't see that way, either, so they never made it to the bottom.
The lake is round. Perfectly round. So the scientists said it was probably an ancient and dormant volcano crater.
Yeah, a volcano on the rez!
The lake was so deep because the volcano crater and tunnels and lava chutes and all that plumbing went all the way down to the center of the earth. That lake was, like, forever deep.
There were all sorts of myths and legends surrounding the lake. I mean, we're Indians,
and we like to make up shit about lakes, you know?
Some people said the lake is named Turtle because it's round and green like a turtle's
shell.
Some people said it's named Turtle because it used to be filled with regular turtles.
Some people said it's named Turtle because it used to be home to this giant snapping
turtle that ate Indians.
A Jurassic turtle. A Steven Spielberg turtle. A King Kong versus the Giant Reservation
Turtle turtle.
I didn't exactly believe in the giant turtle myth. I was too old and smart for that. But I'm still an Indian, and we like to be scared. I don't know what it is about us. But we love ghosts. We love monsters.
But I was really scared of this other story about Turtle Lake.
My dad told me the story.
When he was a kid he watched a horse drown in Turtle Lake and disappear.
"Some of the others say it was a giant turtle that grabbed the horse," Dad said. "But they're lying. They were just being silly. That horse was just stupid. It was so stupid we named it Stupid Horse."
Well, Stupid Horse sank into the endless depths of Turtle Lake and everybody figured
that was the end of that story.
But a few weeks later, Stupid Horse's body washed up on the shores of Benjamin Lake,
ten miles away from Turtle Lake.
"Everybody just figured some joker had found the body and moved it," Dad said. "To scare people."
People laughed at the practical joke. Then a bunch of guys threw the dead horse into the back of a truck, drove it to the dump, and burned it.
Simple story, right?
No, it doesn't end there.
"Well, a few weeks after they burned the body, a bunch of kids were swimming in Turtle Lake when it caught fire."
YES, THE WHOLE LAKE CAUGHT ON FIRE!
The kids were swimming close to the dock. Because the lake was so deep, most kids
swam close to shore. And the fire started out in the middle of the lake, so the kids were able to safely climb out of the water before it all went up like a big bowl of gasoline.
"It burned for a few hours," Dad said. "Burned hot and fast. And then it went out. Just like that. People stayed away for a few days then went to take a look at the damage, you know?
And guess what they found? Stupid Horse washed up on shore again."
Despite being burned at the dump, and burned again in the lake of fire, Stupid Horse was untouched. Well, the horse was still dead, of course, but it was unburned. Nobody went near the horse after that. They just let it rot. But it took a long time—too long. For weeks, the dead body just lay there. Didn't go bad or anything. Didn't stink. The bugs and animals stayed away. Only after a few weeks did Stupid Horse finally let go. His skin and flesh melted away. The maggots and coyotes ate their fill. Then the horse was just bones.
"Let me tell you," Dad said. "That was just about the scariest thing I've ever seen. That horse skeleton lying there. It was freaky."
After a few more weeks, the skeleton collapsed into a pile of bones. And the water and
the wind dragged them away.
It was a freaky story!
* * *
"Nobody swam in Turtle Lake for ten, eleven years," Dad said.
Me, I don't think anybody should be swimming in there now. But people forget. They
forget good things and they forget bad things. They forget that lakes can catch on fire. They forget that dead horses can magically vanish and reappear.
I mean, jeez, we Indians are just weird.
So, anyway, on that hot summer day, Rowdy and I walked the five miles from my house
to Turtle Lake. All the way, I thought about fire and horses, but I wasn't going to tell Rowdy abo
ut that. He would've just called me a wuss or a pussy. He would've just said it was kid stuff.
He would've just said it was a hot day that needed a cold lake.
As we walked, I saw that monster pine tree ahead of us.
It was so tall and green and beautiful. It was the only reservation skyscraper, you know?
"I love that tree," I said.
"That's because you're a tree fag," Rowdy said.
"I'm not a tree fag," I said.
"Then how come you like to stick your dick inside knotholes?"
"I stick my dick in the girl trees," I said.
Rowdy laughed his ha-ha, hee-hee avalanche laugh.
I loved to make him laugh. I was the only one who knew how to make him laugh.
"Hey," he said. "You know what we should do?"
I hated when Rowdy asked that particular question. It meant we were about to do
something dangerous.
"What should we do?" I asked.
"We should climb that monster."
"That tree?"
"No, we should climb your big head," he said. "Of course, I'm talking about that tree. The biggest tree on the rez."
It wasn't really open to debate. I had to climb the tree. Rowdy knew I had to climb the tree with him. I couldn't back down. That wasn't how our friendship worked.
"We're going to die," I said.
"Probably," Rowdy said.
So we walked over to the tree and looked up. It was way tall. I got dizzy.
"You first," Rowdy said.
I spit on my hands, rubbed them together, and reached up for the first branch. I pulled myself up to the next branch. And then the next and the next and the next. Rowdy followed me.
Branch by branch, Rowdy and I climbed toward the top of the tree, to the bottom of the
sky.
Near the top, the branches got thinner and thinner. I wondered if they'd support our
weight. I kept expecting one of them to snap and send me plummeting to my death.
But it didn't happen.
The branches would not break.
Rowdy and I climbed and climbed and climbed. We made it to the top. Well, almost to
the top. Even Rowdy was too scared to step on the thinnest branches. So we made it within ten feet of the top. Not the summit. But close enough to call it the summit.
We clung tightly to the tree as it swung in the breeze.
I was scared, sure, terrified… but it was also fun, you know?