I will beg, I will beg For your devotion
Then do my best
To lead you astray.
66.
The Urban Indian Boy Enjoys Good Health
Insurance
Though I drove to the rez and back, and sat in bad chairs For three days straight, my chronically injured back Somehow didn’t collapse, so I made it through My mother’s funeral and wake. But, eleven days later, My back spasms when I open our front door in Seattle
And I have to lower myself to the floor. Hello, Mr. Grief, I was wondering when you would find Where I am weakest. Look at me push myself Across the floor with one leg extended like An eccentric baby. At first, I crawl for the pain
Pills, then remember that I’m the recovering Drunk who threw them away, so I force myself To my feet and slowly pace the breadth and length Of the hallway because using my re-torn muscles Is the best way to regain their strength.
67.
The Raid
In the thirteen days and twelve hours since We waked and honored and buried my mother, I’ve murdered sixty-five carpenter ants—
In my now-invaded home—with spray, traps, Magazines, books, spoons, and all of my shoes.
I stomp, I stomp, I stomp, I stomp and stomp
On those three-segmented Gods, and see, With each death, that “retribute” is a verb That’s terse, lovely, and sadly underused.
68.
Ursine
Driving my son to camp, I saw a black bear Rise on its hind legs to watch us roll by.
A few hours later, after dropping off my son, I drove past that same spot and realized
That black bear was a small tree—burned, split, And twisted by lightning. How had I confused A tree for a bear? I didn’t need to see a bear.
Minutes later, in a little town, I was bemused
To see my mother strolling on the sidewalk.
She’d been dead for a month. Oh! Hello, ghost!
I waved. She waved back. And then she tripped And fell hard. Oh, shit! I pulled off the road,
Jumped out of my car, and ran back to help My mother. But, wait, it wasn’t my mother.
It was a white woman who fell. She smiled
As I helped her to her feet. And I wondered
What other ghosts might appear. “Are you okay?”
I asked. And the woman said, “I mostly fell On the grass. Yes, I am good.” She thanked me And strolled away. Another story to tell,
I thought as I walked back to my car, about how Everything I see and believe is contradicted By everything else. But I am okay with my lack Of faith. I don’t feel sacred or afflicted.
I mean—hey, I get why people are desperate To fit this copious world into one prayer.
But as for me? I’ll be the secular clown
Happy to mistake his late mother for a bear.
69.
Persistence
ON A SATURDAY afternoon, sometime in the mid-1970s, I walked home from my friend’s house to discover my mother, in our kitchen, loading canned food into a cardboard box. My mother often cooked for funerals, but I hadn’t heard of anybody dying. And I wasn’t sure how a few cans of baked beans and evaporated milk would feed dozens of mourners anyway.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m giving food to the O’Neal family,” she said.
“But not the cling peaches,” I said, worried. I loved the cling peaches.
The O’Neals were a poor white family who’d moved to the reservation a few months earlier. It wasn’t unusual for Indians to marry white folks and create biracial families on our reservation. But the O’Neals—a mother, father, and approximately seven sons and daughters—weren’t friends or family with anybody on the rez. They were an entirely white family who had suddenly appeared like a magician’s rabbits. Why would a family choose to live on a strange reservation among Indian strangers? I would guess it had something to do with the O’Neals’ extreme poverty. There were lots of poor Indians on our reservation. I’d say the poverty was almost universal—save for the few dozen people who worked for the tribe or the Bureau of Indian Affairs—but the O’Neals were so poor that it boggled our poor Indian minds. They wore the same gingham dresses and denim overalls to school every day, and their shoes and boots were repaired with generations of tape, string, and pieces of random fabric. I don’t know how much time John Steinbeck had spent on Indian reservations, but he could have written the O’Neals into existence.
At school, a few days after their arrival, the O’Neal kid in my class, Bobby, sat beside me at lunch and attacked the food. He open-mouth-chewed, choked a few times because he was eating so fast, and finished his tray in seconds. I’d been hungry many times in my life. When I was seven years old, I once went thirty-two hours without eating as my parents were out looking for money like subsistence hunters scouting for deer. Thirty-two hours is certainly not a physically dangerous amount of time to go without food, but it was scary. I hadn’t known when I would get to eat again. And as my hunger grew, I’d wondered if I would ever eat again. But I’d experienced only a hint of what it truly means to be hungry. I had never felt as ravenous in my life as Bobby O’Neal appeared to be on that bright afternoon. He must not have eaten for days and days. And I would later learn that the five school lunches that he received were often the only food he’d eat that week.
“Can I have more?” he asked me after he’d licked his tray clean.
“Yes,” I said. “If they have extra.”
“Really?” he said.
I nodded.
He started crying. From gratitude, I guess. He was sitting in the lunchroom of one of the poorest schools in the state and he was sobbing because there was a chance of getting a second helping of Tater Tots and mysterious gravy. If I’d had the literary vocabulary, I would have recognized the situation as a tragic comedy.
He stood and picked up his empty tray.
“You have to wait until they give the signal,” I said. “And then you get in the line again. But be nice, or they won’t serve you.”