When performing for crowds, I like to say, “When I was a kid, I shared an outhouse with sixteen Indians. But I only remember fourteen of them.”
That primitive house was infinitely better than the series of filthy highway motels and filthier downtown hotels in and around Spokane where we’d sometimes stay for days or weeks whenever my parents had extra money, or a temporary job, or needed a sad-ass sabbatical from reservation life.
My parents sold blood for money to buy food.
Poverty was our spirit animal.
Once, when he was only five or six, my big brother told my aunt that he was going to hock all of our furniture to the pawnshop, just like “Mom and Dad always do,” so he could buy Kentucky Fried Chicken.
My aunt, the white one, told me that story. My big brother doesn’t remember it.
He said, “That chicken thing sounds more like something you’d write in a book than something I would say for real.”
I vividly remember moving from that old house into our HUD house only fifty yards away. The front and back stairs were not yet built, so we had to climb a ladder to get into the place. Ludicrous, I know, but it felt magical. I remember a photograph of us four children posing on the ladder. We looked more like mesa-dwelling Hopi Indians than salmon-fishing Spokane Indians.
My little sister doesn’t remember that photograph. She doubts it exists.
“You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.”
“That’s just a fancy way of calling me a liar,” I said.
“If the moccasin fits, then wear it,” she said.
I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”
Simon, a beautiful storyteller, doesn’t remember ever saying such a thing.
“That sounds like something I might say,” he said to me. “But I don’t know if I have ever said that particular thing.”
I don’t remember when I first learned of the quote. Did I read it in one of Simon’s poems or stories? If so, then why doesn’t Simon remember that he wrote it? Can a writer forget something that he’s written in one of his own books? Yes, of course. I wrote my first novel over two decades ago, and fans often stump me by asking questions about passages that I don’t remember writing. So perhaps I read that quote somewhere else and have mistakenly attributed it to Simon. Or did I hear somebody else quote Simon? My college writing teacher, Alex Kuo, is a big fan of literary-inspired practical jokes and postmodern riddles, so maybe he’s the one who quoted or misquoted Simon.
“Do you know this Simon Ortiz quote about fiction and truth?” I asked Alex. “Did you tell me he said it?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t remember that quote. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t tell you I knew it sometime in the past. I could have invented it. Or maybe you invented the quote and are giving me partial credit for citing the quote while fully crediting Simon for originally inventing the quote.”
“So maybe I’m the one who thought it first?” I said. “And I want to honor you and Simon.”
“Well,” Alex said. “Crediting your thoughts to your mentors sounds more like you’re honoring yourself.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “And sad. Is my ego the source of all my deception and self-deception?”
“Perhaps,” Alex said. “Since you’ve just invented this entire conversation about storytelling and truth that you and I never had, and put it in the first chapter of your memoir, then I’m just going to call you the unreliable narrator of your own life.”
So, okay, maybe I am unreliable to some degree. But, despite what my teachers, parents, friends, siblings, and I say about my storytelling—about my labyrinthine fantasy life—I also know that I have an excellent memory.
To quote a song lyric I vaguely remember from a song and band I can’t fully recall: I remember everything.
I remember that my mother and father hosted a New Year’s Eve party in our HUD house on the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1973. Or 1972 or 1974.
I was only seven years old, but I knew, with a fundamentalist’s fervor, that the party was potentially lethal. Not because of my mother and father’s actions, but because of their inattentions. They were alcoholics who’d get what they laughingly called bottle-blind, as in “I was so bottle-blind that I didn’t even realize I’d driven off the road until I woke up with a pine tree branch sticking through the car windshield about four inches from my nose.” That’s what my father said—or approximately what he said—after his eleventh or nineteenth or twenty-seventh drunken car wreck.
So, yes, my bottle-blind parents invited everybody on the reservation to that dangerous New Year’s Eve party, including two Indian men who were widely believed—who were known—to have committed murders.
One of those murderers, a half-white little guy with a wicked temper and a silly-ass gunfighter’s mustache, had supposedly buried his victim’s body in Manito Park, in Spokane. An anonymous person had called into a secret witness phone line and claimed that my father, while not guilty of the murder, knew where the body was buried. My father had twice been in prison for burglary and forgery, so he was certainly known to the police. They must have taken that anonymous call seriously because they asked my father to come in and answer a few questions. And I still find it strange and hilarious that my father took me, only nine or ten years old, along on that little cold-case adventure.
As my father drove us from the reservation to the police station in Spokane, he told me that he’d only heard the same rumors about the murder as everybody else.
“They could talk to every Indian around here,” my father said. “And we’d all tell the same story.”
My father was a shy and gentle man, even when drunk, so I don’t believe that he was capable of physically hurting anybody. But he was also an alcoholic who was exceedingly loyal to other indigenous folks and deeply suspicious of any authority figure. I knew that my father would protect any Indian against any investigation by white men. My father wouldn’t throw a punch or pull a trigger or name names. Silence was his short bow and quiver of arrows.
I didn’t witness that interview—or maybe I should call it a casual interrogation—and my father never shared any of the details. I just waited for hours in our family car outside the police station as he told the story—or did not tell the story—about his alleged role or nonrole in that murder. He must have been innocent of any wrongdoing because he was free to drive us back to the reservation that day and was never compelled to speak of the incident again.
But I still wonder if there is a body buried in Manito Park. I still wonder if my father knew where to find that body. I know exactly where my dead father is buried. Maybe I’ll interrogate his tombstone the next time I visit that reservation cemetery.
“How many murderers did you know?” I will ask the tombstone again and again.
And the tombstone will never answer. Because the dead have only the voices we give to them.
The other murderer at that New Year’s Eve party was a Vietnam War veteran. Not long after he’d been honorably discharged and returned to the reservation, he and some Indian friends attacked a white man. According to the stories, the war vet kicked that white man’s eye clean out of his head and then dumped him to die in a roadside ditch. Today, some folks say the man survived the beating—and that cold night spent unconscious in the dirt—and moved to another state. Some say the beating wasn’t that bad in the first place. It was just an ordinary fight—as ordinary as a fight can be when it’s five or six Indian men assaulting one white man. Some say the white man did lose his eye but blamed himself for the fight and for his injury. Some say he became a better man because of his missing eye. Yes, some folks have turned that murder story into a mythical tale about redemption. Some folks—some creative storytellers—have change
d a violent Indian man into the spiritual teacher of a one-eyed white wanderer.
We all justify our sins, venal or mortal.
There was also a third murderer at that New Year’s Eve party, but that killing would take place a few years later. So maybe I should say there was a future murderer at the party. And that murder would take place in a convenience-store parking lot in Spokane. It would happen in an old car. One of my father’s more distant friends would shoot and kill one of my father’s closest cousins.
He served only five or eight years in prison for the murder and then vanished, either to escape the Indians intent on revenge or because those vengeful Indians had made him vanish.
But no, my little sister fact-checked me and said, “That guy got out of prison and lived in a HUD house on the rez until he died.”
“What?” I said. “He lived in Wellpinit? No way. Did you ever talk to him?”
“He tried to talk to us,” she said. “But I just walked past him.”
“And nobody tried to get revenge on him?”
“No, he was just an outcast. People walked circles around him like he was a disease.”
“That’s all that happened to him?” I asked.
“Killers get away with killing,” she said.
So, yes, I grew up with murderers. But, strangely enough, I wasn’t all that worried about their presence at that New Year’s Eve party. I wasn’t afraid of being killed as much as I was afraid of being sexually abused. I knew there would be five or six party guests who’d sexually molested my friends and cousins. There would be guests who’d raped only adults. And guests who’d raped only children. And opportunists who had and would violate any vulnerable woman, man, or child. I’d been abused by one man. I knew he’d be at the party, so I assumed I’d have to specifically protect myself against him and generally protect myself against all of the other predators.
As an adult, I can look back at the violence on my reservation and logically trace it back to the horrific degradations, sexual and otherwise, committed against my tribe by generations of white American priests, nuns, soldiers, teachers, missionaries, and government officials. The abused can become abusers. It’s a tragic progression. But, as a child, even a very bright child, I had little knowledge of Native American history. We Spokane Indian children weren’t even taught about our own tribal history. I only knew my personal history. And, in my story, the villains were other Spokane Indians. My monsters had brown skin, with dark hair and eyes, and they looked like me.
So, as my mother and father prepared for that New Year’s Eve party, I walked downstairs into my bedroom, reached far under my bed, and pulled out a clear plastic bag heavy with forty metal butter knives. I’d purchased the bag of used knives at Goodwill or Value Village or Salvation Army or some other secondhand store. Or maybe I bought them at Dutch’s Pawnshop in downtown Spokane. I don’t remember. But I do recall that the bag cost me two dollars. That was a significant amount of money for a poor reservation kid. I could have bought at least thirty pieces of penny candy at Irene’s Grocery Store. But, even as a kid, I had more important uses for my money than sweets. I needed knives. And I shoved them, one by one, into the narrow gap between my bedroom door and the jamb. This locked the door in place. It could not be easily opened. That door looked armored with all of those knives. That door looked like a giant wood and metal porcupine, fierce and ready to defend me. But, alas, that door and jamb were actually hollow and thin. The knives were cheap and pliable. I still hoped their combined strength would be enough to keep the door shut against any monsters. Well, truthfully, I knew those knives were not strong enough to keep a dedicated monster from breaking into my room. But those forty knives would be strong enough to make a monster pause and reconsider. Those forty knives would make a monster worry that he was making too much noise as he beat at the door. He’d be scared that the noise would attract the attention of other adults—maybe my parents if they weren’t too bottle-blind—who would then come downstairs to investigate the commotion. Those forty knives might make a monster wonder if I was armed with other, sharper knives. Maybe that monster would decide to search for an easier target. Do you know that old joke about how you don’t have to run faster than a charging grizzly—you just have to run faster than your hiking companions? Well, I was using the same survivor logic. My bedroom fortress didn’t need to be impenetrable. It just needed to be stronger than everybody else’s defenses—stronger than all of the other Indian children who were as vulnerable as or more vulnerable than me.
Self-preservation was my religion.
Above all else, I knew those forty butter knives would delay the monster long enough for me to climb through my basement window and escape into the pine forest behind my house. I’d spent so much time in those woods that I’d memorized them. I could safely run and avoid all the trees, fallen and not. I could leap the small creek and hurdle the glacial boulders. It would not have mattered if the forest was barely lit by moonlight or not illuminated at all. I wasn’t afraid of the dark nearly as much as I was afraid of the monsters who hunted by night and day.
But the monsters didn’t come after me that night. Instead, it was my parents who terrified me the most.
I was still awake at midnight when the party went into full crazy mode, with singing and screaming and cursing and pistols and rifles fired into the night sky. Those reservation Indian parties felt less like celebrations and more like ceremonial preparation for a battle that never quite arrived.
But I was asleep when I heard my father curse and grunt and war-whoop. When I heard bodies slamming into walls. When I heard my father cry out in pain.
Stupidly, bravely, I crawled out of bed, pulled the forty butter knives from my door—keeping one as a dull weapon—and ran upstairs. I was only seven or eight or nine years old, but I was going to defend my father. I’d always been that foolish and brave. When I was four, I picked up a miniature wooden baseball bat and attacked the skulls, arms, and legs of three white boys who were picking on my big brother in a motel parking lot in Spokane. I chased those white boys away and then, still blind with rage, attacked my brother. And, as he often had to during our youth, he disarmed me, and bear-hugged me until I, exhausted and furious, passed out in his arms.
At that New Year’s Eve party, I raced up the stairs, whipped open the door, expecting to stab the men attacking my father, but was surprised to see he was playing a rough version of rugby, wrestling, boxing, and one-on-one Nerf basketball against an Indian friend—one of those guys nicknamed Bug or Mouse or Poochie. My father and his friend were drunkenly laughing and bleeding from various cuts and scrapes. They were unholy clowns. Dozens of partygoers were cheering and making bets. Nobody noticed me. I wasn’t scared as much as I was confused.
Then my father and his friend, locked in a violent embrace, wrestle-staggered toward me. I froze. And I would have likely been knocked over and maybe badly hurt, but some conscientious drunk pulled me out of the way. And I watched as my father and his friend pulled and pushed each other through the open basement door—the door I had left open—and tumbled down the thinly carpeted staircase.
Fearing they had killed themselves, I ran to the top of the staircase to see them, even more bloody and bruised, weakly laughing in a two-man pile on the basement floor. They were too drunk and injured to stand, so they soon fell asleep still wrapped in each other’s arms.
Meanwhile, my mother was playing poker against a group of other Native women.
“You’re cheating me,” my mother screamed at Birdie, a Spokane Indian woman who was not much bigger than me.
“No, Lillian,” Birdie said. “I don’t know how to play. I’m not cheating. Teach me how to play.”
My mother screamed again and punched Birdie in the mouth.
Birdie grabbed her face and wept.
My mother punched her in the forehead.
Then Birdie wailed like a rabbit being killed by a hawk. She was only bruised and bloody, but her pain still sounded like a death
cry,
“Why did you hit me?” Birdie howled. “Why? Why? Why?”
I remember the blood ran between Birdie’s teeth like water flowing around river rocks.
“Lillian, why did you hit me?” Birdie wailed. “Lillian. Lillian.”
I was terrified and turned to run back downstairs. But somebody picked me up, carried me to the master bedroom, and threw me onto the bed, where a dozen other Indian kids were already wrapped around one another like a frightened litter of pups.
I found my little sisters in that dark scrum, and we held hands until we fell asleep.
At dawn, my mother woke my sisters and me. My big brother stood at her side. I don’t know where he had slept that night. In his room? At our cousins’ house? In a tree in the woods behind our house?
“Wake up, wake up,” my mother said. “We’re leaving and we’re never coming back.”
Exhausted, terrified, my siblings and I followed our mother outside to the car. We all piled into the backseat—without seat belts, kid seats, or any other kind of safety—as Mom started the engine and sped us away from our HUD house.
She cursed our father as she drove.
She also sang Christian hymns.
She sang ancient Spokane Indian songs that sounded like each note was filled with ten thousand years of grief.
Our mother drove us to Chewelah, Washington, the small white town north of the reservation where she was born. In her most desperate and lonesome moments, my mother often returned like a salmon to her place of birth, which had been a Spokane Indian gathering place in earlier centuries. Once in Chewelah, she pulled us out of the car and into a diner. We shuffled past white customers who stared at us with hate, pity, disgust, and anger—the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Indian Apocalypse.