AT REARDAN, I became something of a boarding school student. After late-night events, I would often stay over with friends rather than drive in the dark back to the reservation. I slept a few times in the high school locker room on piles of laundered towels. If my car was running and the weather was good, I might sleep in the backseat.
During winter, when the road between my reservation and Reardan was unnavigable, I would sometimes sleep on a couch in the basement of the Lutheran church.
Yeah, I was the Indian taking refuge with the Christians.
Rather ironic, enit?
And cinematic, too, in a Frank Capra dark-subtext sort of way.
But it wasn’t completely cinematic because, if it had been a movie, I would have kissed the Lutheran minister’s daughter—I would have made out with the preacher’s kid.
But I never did kiss her.
She’d already graduated high school and was off to college by the time I was sleeping on that Lutheran couch.
I never enjoyed the spiritually ironic privilege of kissing any preacher’s daughter.
But I did marry a Native American woman with a master’s in theology. So, you know, I have made babies with a Christian. Yep, some ironies can be tender sacraments that feel great in the dark. And in the light.
75.
Skin
I DON’T REMEMBER my first pimple. But I do remember, at age seventeen, when I stood at the bathroom mirror and counted forty-seven zits on my face.
Who knows how much body dysmorphia I was experiencing at that moment—I’ve never read a scientific study about the psychological effects of having extensive acne—but I do remember feeling freakish and ugly. I felt disfigured.
At age fifty, I still have to use a variety of acne-treatment soaps and moisturizers. There’s something poetic about one of my crow’s-feet wrinkles reaching toward a zit as if it were a raspberry dropped on a brown dirt road.
My face doesn’t appear to be acne-scarred, not at first or second glance. My brown skin seems to camouflage a lot of the damage. But in certain lights and at certain angles, and especially in black-and-white photos, my acne scars become more evident.
Or maybe they don’t. Maybe I am hyperaware of them. After reading early drafts of this chapter, many friends told me that they’d never noticed my scars. So do I still have the scars? Am I seeing something that is not there? Maybe I have never stopped being that poor Indian teenager, staring into the mirror at his ravaged face.
I am especially self-conscious of the acne scars on my back.
A decade ago, my younger son saw my back as I was changing my shirt in the laundry room. I hadn’t realized he was there. He later asked his mother, my wife, if my back had been burned.
“No,” my wife said. “Your father had really bad acne. And those are his scars.”
“Why didn’t he use medicine?” my son asked.
“Your dad was too poor to get good health care,” my wife said. “Nobody ever gave him the right medicine.”
“Is that why Dad gets after us about washing our faces?” my son asked.
“Yes,” she said.
It’s true. I have been diligent about my sons’ complexions. I’ve been paranoid. Thank God they have both inherited their mother’s clear and lovely skin. But I started buying my sons the most scientifically effective acne soap and lotions as soon as they entered puberty.
For me, “Wash your face” is another way to say “I love you.”
My mother and father had clear skin. My siblings all have clear skin. I don’t know why I was the only one marked by acne. But sometimes I wonder if I was scarred by evil forces, or if I am the evil one who was scarred as a warning to others. Well, I don’t actually believe in that kind of superstitious bullshit.
And yet. And yet.
When I was in sixth grade on the reservation, I witnessed an Indian girl getting bullied by an Indian boy. He was a tall and handsome star athlete from one of the more socially powerful families on the reservation. She was a member of a powwow family, not ostracized but not popular. Her family were all dancers, singers, drummers, and stick-game players. They were, to use a Native idiom, “traditional.” And they were also rumored to possess suumesh, a Salish word that translates most simply as “magic,” but is best understood by non-Salish people as the equivalent of the Force in Star Wars mythology.
So, yes, that bullied girl was a Spokane Indian Jedi. Or maybe, given her age, she was only a Padawan, a Jedi apprentice, a beginner at suumesh.
But I wasn’t thinking about magic when I witnessed that popular kid stand over that traditional girl’s desk and whisper, “You’re ugly.”
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“You’re the ugliest girl in the whole school,” he whispered.
“Shut up,” she said.
Tears welled in her eyes. She was trying not to cry. There was nothing worse than crying. If you cried on my reservation, then even your best friends would make fun of you.
“You are the ugliest girl on the whole rez,” he whispered.
She wept. Tears rolled down her face and dropped onto her desk. Other Indians laughed at her. I’d like to say I didn’t laugh at her, but I don’t remember. I was among the most bullied kids, and defending other bullied kids only earned you another beating. So I probably laughed at her.
“You are the ugliest Indian girl in the world,” he whispered.
That was all she could endure. Only twelve years old, she rose from her desk, pointed at that bully, and said, “I curse you. I curse you. I curse you. You are going to be the ugly one. You are always going to be the ugly one.”
Almost everybody laughed. But she scared the shit out of me. Her little-girl voice had sounded so adult, so old and scratchy, so grandmotherly.
Or maybe I only imagined it sounded like that.
A week later, the bully, so handsome and clean, came to school with a zit on his face. Within a month, his face was more ravaged by acne than even mine would be later. He would be acne-scarred until he died of cancer, in his late thirties.
That girl had cursed him. And, well, fuck me, it seemed like the curse was real. The curse had worked.
Of course, that popular kid had just entered his teen years—the age of acne—and he had to suffer through the same shitty health care as the rest of us. So there are logical, economic, and banal reasons for the sudden onset of his acne.
And yet. And yet.
My skin started to go bad when I left the reservation to attend the farm-town high school twenty-two miles away. So I have often wondered, irrationally, if I had been cursed for leaving my people. I wondered if I was the victim of dark suumesh.