War Dances (3 page)

An owl.

What kind of bird was that?

Another owl.

Oh, that one was too quick and small to be an owl. What was it?

A quick and small owl.

One night, when I was sixteen, I was driving with my girlfriend up on Little Falls Flat and this barn owl swooped down over the road, maybe fifty feet or so in front of us, and came flying straight toward our windshield. It was huge, pterodactyl-size, and my girlfriend screamed. And—well, I screamed, too, because that thing was heading straight for us, but you know what I did? I slammed on the gas and sped toward that owl. Do you know why I did that?

Because you wanted to play chicken with the owl?

Exactly.

So what happened?

When we were maybe a second from smashing into each other, that owl just flapped its wings, but barely. What’s a better word than
flap
? What’s a word that still means
flap,
but a smaller
flap
?

How about
slant?

Oh, yes, that’s pretty good. So, like I was saying, as that owl was just about to smash into our windshield, it slanted its wings, and slanted up into the dark. And it was so friggin’ amazing, you know? I just slammed on the brakes and nearly slid into the ditch. And my girlfriend and I were sitting there in the dark with the engine
tick, tick, ticking
like some kind of bomb, but an existential bomb, like it was just measuring out the endless nothingness of our lives because that owl had nearly touched us but was gone forever. And I said something like, “That was magnificent,” and my girlfriend—you want to know what she said?

She said something like, “I’m breaking up with you.”

Damn, that’s exactly what she said. And I asked her, “Why are you breaking up with me?” And do you know what she said?

She said, “I’m breaking up with you because you are not an owl.”

Yes, yes, yes, and you know what? I have never stopped thinking about her. It’s been twenty-seven years, and I still miss her. Why is that?

Brother, you don’t miss her. You miss the owl.

How many planets do you want to destroy?

Don’t worry, Daddy, this is just a big toy,

And there is nothing more fun than making noise.

My sons, when I was a boy, I threw dirt clods

And snow grenades stuffed with hidden rocks, and fought

Enemies—other Indian boys—who thought,

Like me, that joyful war turned us into gods.

A
FEW YEARS AGO
, after I returned from a trip to Los Angeles, I unpacked my bag and found a dead cockroach, shrouded by a dirty sock, in a bottom corner. “Shit,” I thought. “We’re being invaded.” And so I threw the unpacked clothes, books, shoes, and toiletries back into the suitcase, carried it out onto the driveway, and dumped the contents onto the pavement, ready to stomp on any other cockroach stowaways. But there was only the one cockroach, stiff and dead. As he lay on the pavement, I leaned closer to him. His legs were curled under his body. His head was tilted at a sad angle. Sad? Yes, sad. For who is lonelier than the cockroach without his tribe? I laughed at myself. I was feeling empathy for a dead cockroach. I wondered about its story. How had it got into my bag? And where? At the hotel in Los Angeles? In an airport baggage system? It didn’t originate in our house. We’ve kept those tiny bastards away from our place for fifteen years. So what had happened to this little vermin? Did he smell something delicious in my bag—my musky deodorant or some crumb of chocolate Power Bar—and climb inside, only to be crushed by the shifts of fate and garment bags? As he died, did he feel fear? Isolation? Existential dread?

Last summer, in reaction to various allergies I was suffering from, defensive mucous flooded my inner right ear and confused, frightened, untied, and unmoored me. Simply stated, I could not fucking hear a thing from that side, so I had to turn my head to understand what my two sons, ages eight and ten, were saying.

“We’re hungry,” they said. “We keep telling you.”

They wanted to be fed. And I had not heard them.

“Mom would have fed us by now,” they said.

Their mother had left for Italy with her mother two days ago. My sons and I were going to enjoy a boys’ week, filled with unwashed socks, REI rock wall climbing, and ridiculous heaps of pasta.

“What are you going to cook?” my sons asked. “Why haven’t you cooked yet?”

I’d been lying on the couch reading a book while they played and I had not realized that I’d gone partially deaf. So I, for just a moment, could only weakly blame the silence—no, the contradictory roar that only I could hear.

Then I recalled the man who went to the emergency room because he’d woken having lost most, if not all, of his hearing. The doctor peered into one ear, saw an obstruction, reached in with small tweezers, and pulled out a cockroach, then reached into the other ear, and extracted a much larger cockroach. Did you know that ear wax is a delicacy for roaches?

I cooked dinner for my sons—overfed them out of guilt—and cleaned the hell out of our home. Then I walked into the bathroom and stood close to my mirror. I turned my head and body at weird angles, and tried to see deeply into my congested ear. I sang hymns and prayed that I’d see a small angel trapped in the canal. I would free the poor thing, and she’d unfurl and pat dry her tiny wings, then fly to my lips and give me a sweet kiss for sheltering her metamorphosis.

When I woke at three a.m., completely unable to hear out of my clogged right ear, and positive that a damn swarm of locusts was wedged inside, I left a message for my doctor, and told him that I would be sitting outside his office when he reported to work.

This would be the first time I had been inside a health-care facility since my father’s last surgery.

After the surgeon cut off my father’s right foot—no, half of my father’s right foot—and three toes from the left, I sat with him in the recovery room. It was more like a recovery hallway. There was no privacy, not even a thin curtain. I guessed it made it easier for the nurses to monitor the postsurgical patients, but still, my father was exposed—his decades of poor health and worse decisions were illuminated—on white sheets in a white hallway under white lights.

“Are you okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question. Who could be okay after such a thing? Yesterday, my father had
walked
into the hospital. Okay, he’d shuffled while balanced on two canes, but that was still called walking. A few hours ago, my father still had both of his feet. Yes, his feet and toes had been black with rot and disease but they’d still been, technically speaking, feet and toes. And, most important, those feet and toes had belonged to my father. But now they were gone, sliced off. Where were they? What did they do with the right foot and the toes from the left foot? Did they throw them in the incinerator? Were their ashes floating over the city?

“Doctor, I’m cold,” my father said.

“Dad, it’s me,” I said.

“I know who are you. You’re my son.” But considering the blankness in my father’s eyes, I assumed he was just guessing at my identity.

“Dad, you’re in the hospital. You just had surgery.”

“I know where I am. I’m cold.”

“Do you want another blanket?” Another stupid question. Of course, he wanted another blanket. He probably wanted me to build a fucking campfire or drag in one of those giant propane heaters that NFL football teams used on the sidelines.

I walked down the hallway—the recovery hallway—to the nurses’ station. There were three women nurses, two white and one black. Being Native American-Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Indian, I hoped my darker pigment would give me an edge with the black nurse, so I addressed her directly.

“My father is cold,” I said. “Can I get another blanket?”

The black nurse glanced up from her paperwork and regarded me. Her expression was neither compassionate nor callous.

“How can I help you, sir?” she asked.

“I’d like another blanket for my father. He’s cold.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment, sir.”

She looked back down at her paperwork. She made a few notes. Not knowing what else to do, I stood there and waited.

“Sir,” the black nurse said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She was irritated. I understood. After all, how many thousands of times had she been asked for an extra blanket? She was a nurse, an educated woman, not a damn housekeeper. And it was never really about an extra blanket, was it? No, when people asked for an extra blanket, they were asking for a time machine. And, yes, she knew she was a health care provider, and she knew she was supposed to be compassionate, but my father, an alcoholic, diabetic Indian with terminally damaged kidneys, had just endured an incredibly expensive surgery for what? So he could ride his motorized wheelchair to the bar and win bets by showing off his disfigured foot? I know she didn’t want to be cruel, but she believed there was a point when doctors should stop rescuing people from their own self-destructive impulses. And I couldn’t disagree with her but I could ask for the most basic of comforts, couldn’t I?

“My father,” I said. “An extra blanket, please.”

“Fine,” she said, then stood and walked back to a linen closet, grabbed a white blanket, and handed it to me. “If you need anything else—”

I didn’t wait around for the end of her sentence. With the blanket in hand, I walked back to my father. It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact, it was too thin. It wasn’t really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn’t even good enough for that. It was more like the world’s largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health care finally come to this? Everybody was uninsured and unblanketed.

“Dad, I’m back.”

He looked so small and pale lying in that hospital bed. How had that change happened? For the first sixty-seven years of his life, my father had been a large and dark man. And now, he was just another pale and sick drone in a hallway of pale and sick drones. A hive, I thought, this place looks like a beehive with colony collapse disorder.

“Dad, it’s me.”

“I’m cold.”

“I have a blanket.”

As I draped it over my father and tucked it around his body, I felt the first sting of grief. I’d read the hospital literature about this moment. There would come a time when roles would reverse and the adult child would become the caretaker of the ill parent. The circle of life. Such poetic bullshit.

“I can’t get warm,” my father said. “I’m freezing.”

“I brought you a blanket, Dad, I put it on you.”

“Get me another one. Please. I’m so cold. I need another blanket.”

I knew that ten more of these cheap blankets wouldn’t be enough. My father needed a real blanket, a good blanket.

I walked out of the recovery hallway and made my way through various doorways and other hallways, peering into the rooms, looking at the patients and their families, looking for a particular kind of patient and family.

I walked through the ER, cancer, heart and vascular, neuroscience, orthopedic, women’s health, pediatrics, and surgical services. Nobody stopped me. My expression and posture were that of a man with a sick father and so I belonged.

And then I saw him, another Native man, leaning against a wall near the gift shop. Well, maybe he was Asian; lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian, too, but not the kind that I needed. It was hard to tell sometimes what people were. Even brown people guessed at the identity of other brown people.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” the other man said.

“You Indian?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What tribe?”

“Lummi.”

“I’m Spokane.”

“My first wife was Spokane. I hated her.”

“My first wife was Lummi. She hated me.”

We laughed at the new jokes that instantly sounded old.

“Why are you in here?” I asked.

“My sister is having a baby,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’s not mine.”

“Ayyyyyy,” I said—another Indian idiom—and laughed.

“I don’t even want to be here,” the other Indian said. “But my dad started, like, this new Indian tradition. He says it’s a thousand years old. But that’s bullshit. He just made it up to impress himself. And the whole family just goes along, even when we know it’s bullshit. He’s in the delivery room waving eagle feathers around. Jesus.”

“What’s the tradition?”

“Oh, he does a naming ceremony right in the hospital. Like, it’s supposed to protect the baby from all the technology and shit. Like hospitals are the big problem. You know how many babies died before we had good hospitals?”

“I don’t know.”

“Most of them. Well, shit, a lot of them, at least.”

This guy was talking out of his ass. I liked him immediately.

“I mean,” the guy said. “You should see my dad right now. He’s pretending to go into this, like, fucking trance and is dancing around my sister’s bed, and he says he’s trying to, you know, see into her womb, to see who the baby is, to see its true nature, so he can give it a name—a protective name—before it’s born.”

The guy laughed and threw his head back and banged it on the wall.

“I mean, come on, I’m a loser,” he said and rubbed his sore skull. “My whole family is filled with losers.”

The Indian world is filled with charlatans, men and women who pretended—hell, who might have come to believe—that they were holy. Last year, I had gone to a lecture at the University of Washington. An elderly Indian woman, a Sioux writer and scholar and charlatan, had come to orate on Indian sovereignty and literature. She kept arguing for some kind of separate indigenous literary identity, which was ironic considering that she was speaking English to a room full of white professors. But I wasn’t angry with the woman, or even bored. No, I felt sorry for her. I realized that she was dying of nostalgia. She had taken nostalgia as her false idol—her thin blanket—and it was murdering her.