War Dances (9 page)

“I’m so sorry, Jeremy,” I said. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“Oh, so I’m supposed to be happy about that? Things would be okay if you’d beaten the shit out of a fag you didn’t know?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay, then, what did you mean?”

“I was wrong to do what I did. Completely wrong.”

“Yes, you were,” he said.

He was smiling. I recognized that smile. Jeremy was giving me shit. Was he going to torture me before he killed me?

“Why didn’t you tell the police it was me?” I asked.

“Because the police don’t give a shit about fags.”

“But we assaulted you. We could have killed you.”

“Doubtful. James had already kicked the crap out of your friends. And he would have kicked the crap out of you and the guy with the tire iron. Let’s just call it a split decision.”

“You didn’t tell James it was me, did you?”

“No, of course not. I told the police a completely different story than James did. And I was the one with the broken face, so they believed me.”

“But what about James? What’s he going to do?”

“Oh, who cares? I barely knew him.”

“But it was a hate crime.”

“Aren’t all crimes, by definition, hate crimes? I mean, people don’t rob banks because they love tellers.”

“I don’t understand you. Why haven’t you gone public with this? You could destroy my father. And me.”

Jeremy sighed.

“Oh, William,” he said. “You’re still such an adolescent. And so romantic. I haven’t turned you in because I’m a Republican, a good one, and I think your father is the finest senator we’ve ever had. I used to think he was a closet Democrat. But he’s become something special. This kind of shit would completely fuck his chance at the presidency.”

Jesus, was this guy more a son to my father than I was?

“And, okay, maybe I’m a romantic, too,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t turn you in because we were best friends and because I still consider you my best friend.”

“But my father hates gay people.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

And so Jeremy explained to me that his sexual preference had nothing to do with his political beliefs.

“Hey,” he said. “I don’t expect to be judged negatively for my fuck buddies. But I don’t want to be judged positively, either. It’s just sex. It’s not like it’s some specialized skill or something. Hell, right now, in this house, one hundred thousand bugs are fucking away. In this city, millions of bugs are fucking at this very moment. And, hey, probably ten thousand humans—and registered voters—are fucking somewhere in this city. Four or five of them might even be married.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Anybody who thinks that sex somehow relates to the national debt or terrorism or poverty or crime or moral values or any kind of politics is just an idiot.”

“Damn, Jeremy, you’ve gotten hard.”

“That’s what all the boys say.”

“And what does James say? What if he goes to the press? What if he sees my face in the newspapers or on TV and recognizes me?”

“James is a little fag coffee barista from Bumfuck, Idaho. Nobody cares what he has to say. Little James could deliver a Martian directly to the White House and people would think it was a green poodle with funny ears.”

I wondered if I’d completely scrambled Jeremy’s brains when I punched him in the head.

“Will you listen to me?” I said. “My father will destroy your life if he feels threatened.”

“Did you know your father called my father that day up in North Bend?” Jeremy asked.

“What day?” I asked. But I knew.

“Don’t be obtuse. After I told you I was gay, you told your father, and your father told my father. And my father beat the shit out of me.”

“You’re lying,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t.

“You think my face looks bad now? Oh, man, my dad broke my cheekbone. Broke my arm. Broke my leg. A hairline fracture of the skull. A severe concussion. I saw double for two months.”

“How come you didn’t go to the police?”

“Oh, my dad took me to the police. Said a gang of kids did it to me. Hoodlums, he called them.”

“How come you didn’t tell the police the truth?”

“Because my dad said he’d kill my mom if I told the truth.”

“I don’t think I believe any of this.”

“You can believe what you want. I know what happened. My father beat the shit out of me because he was ashamed of me. And I let him because I was ashamed of me. And because I loved my mom.”

I stared at him. Could he possibly be telling the truth? Are there truths as horrible as this one? In abandoning him when he was sixteen, did I doom him to a life with a violent father and a beaten mother?

“But you know the best thing about all of this?” he asked.

I couldn’t believe there’d be any good in this story.

“When my father was lying in his hospital bed, he asked for me,” Jeremy said. “Think about it. My father was dying of cancer. And he called for me. He needed me to forgive him. And you know what?”

“What?” I asked, though I didn’t want to know.

“I went into his room, hugged him and told him I forgave him and I loved him, and we cried and then he died.”

“I can’t believe any of this.”

“It’s all true.”

“You forgave your father?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “It really made me wish I was Roman or Greek, you know? A classical Greek god would have killed his lying, cheating father and
then
given him forgiveness. And a classical Greek god would have better abs, too. That’s what Greek gods are all about, you know? Patricide and low body fat.”

How could anybody be capable of that much forgiveness? I was reminded of the black man, the convicted rapist, who’d quietly proclaimed his innocence all during his thirty years in prison. After he was exonerated by DNA evidence and finally freed, that black man completely forgave the white woman who’d identified him as her rapist. He said he forgave her because it would do him no good to carry that much anger in his heart. I often wonder if that man was Jesus come back.

“The thing is, Willy,” Jeremy said, “you’ve always been such a moral guy. Six years old, and you made sure that everybody got equal time on the swings, on the teeter-totter, on the baseball field. Even the losers. And you learned that from your father.”

“My father is a great man,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I had to believe it, though, or my foundations would collapse.

“No,” Jeremy said. “Your father has great ideas, but he’s an ordinary man, just like all of us. No, your father is more of an asshole than usual. He likes to hit people.”

“He’s only hit me a couple of times.”

“That you can remember.”

“What does that mean?”

“We wouldn’t practice denial if it didn’t work.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Oh, you’re scary. What are you going to do, punch me in the face?”

We laughed.

“It comes down to this,” Jeremy said. “You can’t be a great father and a great politician at the same time. Impossible. Can’t be a great father and a great writer, either. Just ask Hemingway’s kids.”

“I prefer Faulkner.”

“Yeah, there’s another candidate for Father of the Year.”

“Okay, okay, writers are bad dads. What’s your point?”

“Your father is great because of his ideas. And those great ideas will make him a great president.”

“Why do you believe in him so much?”

“It’s about sacrifice. Listen, I am a wealthy American male. I can’t campaign for something as silly and fractured as gay marriage when there are millions of Muslim women who can’t even show their ankles. Your daddy knows that. Everybody knows it.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I hate to sound like a campaign worker or something, but listen to me. I believe in him so much that I’ll pay ten bucks for a gallon of gas. I believe in him so much that I’m going to let you go free.”

I wondered if Jeremy had been beaten so often that it had destroyed his spirit. Had he lost the ability to defend himself? How many times could he forgive the men who had bloodied and broken him? Is there a finite amount of forgiveness in the world? Was there a point after which forgiveness, even the most divinely inspired, is simply the act of a coward? Or has forgiveness always been used as political capital?

“Jeremy,” I asked, “what am I supposed to do with all this information?”

“That’s up to you, sweetheart.”

Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth than can be explained by
Meet the Press.

Jeremy and I haven’t talked since that day. We agreed that our friendship was best left abandoned in the past. My crime against him was also left in the past. As expected, the police did not pursue the case, and it was soon filed away. There was never any need to invent a story.

I cannot tell you what happened to James, or to Eddie and Spence, or to Bernard. We who shared the most important moment of our lives no longer have any part in the lives of the others. It happens that way. I imagine that someday one of them might try to tell the whole story. And I imagine nobody would believe them. Who would believe any of them? Or me? Has a liar ever told the truth?

As for my father, he lost his reelection bid and retired to the relatively sad life of an ex-senator. He plays golf three times a week. State leaders beg for his advice.

My father and I have never again discussed that horrible night. We have no need or right to judge each other for sins that might have already doomed us to a fiery afterlife. Instead, we both silently forgave each other, and separately and loudly pray to God for his forgiveness. I’ll let you know how that works out.

When

Lincoln

Delivered

The

Emancipation

Proclamation,

Who

Knew

that, one year earlier, in 1862, he’d signed and approved the order for the largest public execution in United States history? Who did they execute? “Mulatto, mixed-bloods, and Indians.” Why did they execute them? “For uprisings against the State and her citizens.” Where did they execute them? Mankato, Minnesota. How did they execute them? Well, Abraham Lincoln thought it was good

And

Just

To

Hang

Thirty-eight

Sioux

simultaneously. Yes, in front of a large and cheering crowd, thirty-eight Indians dropped to their deaths. Yes, thirty-eight necks snapped. But before they died, thirty-eight Indians sang their death songs. Can you imagine the cacophony of thirty-eight different death songs? But wait, one Indian was pardoned at the last minute, so only thirty-seven Indians had to sing their death songs. But, O, O, O, O, can you imagine the cacophony of that one survivor’s mourning song? If he taught you the words, do you think you would sing along?

In 1973, my father and I saw
Enter the Dragon,
the greatest martial arts movie of all time. I loved Bruce Lee. I wanted to be Bruce Lee. Afterward, as we walked to our car, I threw punches and kicks at the air.

“Hey, Dad,” I asked, “is Bruce Lee the toughest guy in the world?”

My father said, “No way. There are five guys in Spokane who could probably kick Bruce Lee’s ass.”

“Really? You mean in a fair fistfight and everything?”

“Who said anything about fair? And who’d want to throw punches with Bruce Lee? I’m not talking about fists. I’m saying there are at least five guys in Spokane who, if they even saw Bruce Lee, they’d walk up to him and just sucker punch him with a baseball bat or a two-by-four or something.”

“That’s not right.”

“You didn’t ask me about right. You asked me about tough.”

“Are you tougher than Bruce Lee?”

“Well, I’m tough in some ways, I guess. But I’m not the kind of guy who will knock somebody in the head with a baseball bat. I’m not going to do that to Bruce Lee. But let me tell you, there are more than five guys in Spokane who would do that. As I’m thinking more and more about it, I’m thinking there are probably fifty crazy guys who’d sneak up behind Bruce Lee at a restaurant and just knock him out with a big frying pan or something.”

“Okay, Dad, that’s enough.”

“And I haven’t even talked about prison dudes. Shoot, every other guy in prison would be happy to sucker punch Bruce Lee. They’d wait in a dark corner for a week, just waiting to ambush Bruce Lee with a chain saw or something. Man, those prison guys aren’t going to mess around with a Jeet Kune Do guy like Bruce Lee. No way. Those prison dudes would build a catapult and fling giant boulders at Bruce Lee.”

“Okay, Dad, I believe you. I’ve heard enough. Stop it, Dad, stop it!”

“Okay, Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just telling you the truth.”

On TV, Uri Geller was bending spoons

With just his mind. “Wow,” I said. “That’s so cool.”

Then, three days later, as I browsed through Rick’s

Pawn Shop, I picked up a book of magic tricks

And learned how to bend spoons almost as well.

I called my act URI GELLER IS GOING TO HELL.

At Expo ’74, in Spokane, I saw my first invisible dog on a leash. A hilarious and agile Chinese man was selling them. “My dog is fast,” he said. And his little pet, in its leash and harness, dragged him across the grass. I thought it was real magic. I didn’t know it was just an illusion. I didn’t know that thick and flexible wires had been threaded through the leash and harness and then shaped to look like a dog—an invisible dog. In fact, I didn’t discover the truth until two years later at our tribe’s powwow, when a felonious-looking white man tried to sell me an invisible dog with a broken leash. Without a taut leash, that invisible dog didn’t move or dance in its harness. The magic was gone. I was an emotional kid, so I started to cry, and the felonious dude said, “Shit, kid, take it, I found it in the garbage anyway.”

In ’76, I also saw the remake
of King Kong.
It was terrible. Even my father, who loved the worst drive-in exploitation crap, said, “It’s Kong, man. What went so wrong?” But that does remind me of a drive-in flick whose name I can’t recall. It’s about a herd of Sasquatch who sneak into a biker gang’s house and kidnap all of the biker women. Later, the biker gang puts spiked wheels on their rods, roars into the woods, somehow finds the Sasquatch, and battles for the women. As the Sasquatch fight and fall and pretend to die, two or three of them lose their costume heads. Their furry masks just go sailing but the actors playing Sasquatch, and the other actors, and the director, and the writer, and the producers, and God just keep on going as if it didn’t matter. And I suppose, for the sake of budget, it
didn’t
matter, but I stood on the top of our van and shouted, “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real!” And some politically aware but unseen dude shouted from out of the dark, “Okay, Little Crazy Horse, we know it’s not real, so get your ass back in your van.”