“I like you,” she said. “Do you want to kiss me?”
I couldn’t talk. But I could move. So I sat on the bumper next to her. I leaned in for the kiss, but she leaned away. I leaned toward her again, and she leaned away again. To and fro. To and fro. Almost a kiss. Not a kiss. Almost a kiss. Not a kiss. I worried that Angie was making fun of me, but then I realized she was having fun. She was enjoying me. I was having fun, too, but I was confused, and obviously not as experienced as she was. And it troubles me now to think about why she was expertly flirtatious.
Then I heard a mocking voice.
“Hey, Junior, who’s your girlfriend?”
It was one of my regular bullies, a muscular Spokane Indian boy who would die young.
“Junior,” he said again. “Who’s your girlfriend?”
My bully was drunk. His two friends, also drunk, laughed. I sensed real danger.
“Run!” I yelled.
So Angie ran. She was the fastest sprinter I had ever seen. She disappeared into the dark before I could take a few steps. I have always been slow. And slow is not a good thing to be when you’re a reservation prey animal.
My three drunk bullies quickly caught me. But they didn’t hurt me too badly. They slapped me in the balls a few times, made fun of my speech impediments, and let me go.
I thought about looking for Angie, but I was scared my bullies would hunt me down again. So I ran the two miles home, crawled into my bed, and did not return to the powwow that year. I skipped the 1980 powwow entirely because I was publicly preparing to leave the rez school for the white high school.
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
While working on this chapter, I texted my sister, “If I stayed on the rez, who do you think I would have married?”
“Ah, you would have met some girl at an all-Indian basketball tourney,” my sister texted back. “Probably some urban Indian from Portland or Seattle. You would have married some Coastal Salish college girl and moved to the city. You woulda got a tattoo of a killer whale.”
“But do you think anybody from our rez would have married me?”
“Doesn’t matter,” my sister texted. “You were always going to leave. You were always going to end up urban.”
In 1981, after my first year among the white folks of Reardan, I returned to our tribe’s Memorial Day powwow. I thought I might get bullied, but I’d grown physically and emotionally stronger in a short time. I was no longer an easy mark. I’d become a popular and admired kid in Reardan, as a scholar and basketball player and, yes, as a potential boyfriend. The girls in Reardan paid attention to me. They asked me questions. I asked them questions. We listened to each other’s answers. I had kissed one girl on a school bus and another in a hayloft.
So, at that powwow, my new and overt self-esteem must have shone like knight’s armor.
One Spokane boy looked at me and said, “Damn, you’re growing like a weed.”
And his friend, another Spokane, said, “His skull is growing even bigger now. It’s a fucking planet.”
I was ready to throw punches, but they kept laughing and walked past.
Both of those Indian boys died before they turned forty. I don’t remember them with anger. Well, I still feel residual anger. But, mostly, I think about how lonely and desperate they must have felt in their short and tragic lives. How much pain had they suffered? How many dark secrets did they have to keep? Why had they always felt the need to pick on me?
That was the last time I felt physically threatened by a bully on my reservation. After that, my reservation enemies and detractors would only gossip about me. And rarely in my presence.
Alone, I walked the powwow circle of vendors. And then stopped when I saw Angie again. Of course, I remembered the white girl I had almost kissed at the powwow two years earlier. I was now almost fifteen. She was sixteen. And she was obviously pregnant and ready to give birth at any moment.
She was working at an ice cream truck, scooping out freezer-burned chocolate and vanilla (“Two flavors is better than one!”) for rez kids. Her big belly—the T-shirt stretched taut over her belly—was smeared with ice cream.
I was stunned by her pregnancy. I remember thinking, “Shit, if things had happened differently two years earlier, maybe I would have gotten her pregnant. Maybe I would be a teen father.”
Then I felt irrationally jealous and possessive, as if Angie and I had been seriously involved, as if we had real-world ties to each other. But, damn, we’d only held hands. Our brief powwow date had lasted maybe fifteen minutes. I didn’t know her last name or where she lived. She lived somewhere that wasn’t the reservation. That was her full address: Pregnant Angie, Not the Reservation, USA.
I was also scared for her. Even then, I knew that, by getting pregnant so young, she had made her life infinitely more difficult. And I kept imagining that other difficult world where I was the father of her child. And then I had to talk to her. I needed to talk to her. So I stood in line and made my slow way toward her.
“What flavor you want?” she asked me when it was finally my turn. She didn’t recognize me. She barely looked at me.
“Chocolate in a plain cone,” I said.
She must have recognized my voice—my lispy, stammering tenor—because she studied my face.
“I know you,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt suddenly embarrassed and shy.
“I know you,” she said again.
I can’t explain why I felt so much shame at that moment. It almost felt like I was the father of her child and I had abandoned her. And I suspect there’s something patriarchal and narcissistic about feeling that way, but I can’t exactly explain that either. I think perhaps I had never been so clearly reminded of the nonfatal ways in which I could have trapped myself on the rez.
“Your name is Junior,” Angie said. She didn’t smile. She didn’t look upset. She had remembered my name, which should have been flattering, I suppose.
“You’re Junior, right?” Angie asked.
At that moment, I thought about who I had become in the two years since I had last seen her.
“My name isn’t Junior,” I said. “I’m Sherman.”
She knew I was lying. But she didn’t challenge me. She didn’t say anything as I turned and walked away.
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
A few years ago, I wrote a poem based on my extremely brief relationship with Angie, but I wrote it as if our relationship had been far more substantial, as if she and I had been older and more desperate, as if the worst things I feared about her life and my life had come true:
White Girl Powwow Love
She was skinny and buttermilk-pale.
She wore her hair with a rattail.
And I knew I’d two-step to jail
For her love, which was the no-fail