Blasphemy (2 page)

Of course, it didn’t help that I knew half of those protestors were my cousin’s loyal customers.

So I felt sorry for the protestors who believed in what they were doing. They were good-hearted people looking to change the system. But when you start fighting for every Indian, you end up defending the terrible ones, too.

That’s what being tribal can do to you. It traps you in the tipi with the murderers and rapists and drug dealers. It seems everywhere you turn, some felon-in-buckskin elbows you in the rib cage.

After a few days of trial and testimony, when things were looking way bad for my cousin, Junior plea-bargained his way to a ten-year prison sentence in Walla Walla State Penitentiary.

Maybe out in six with good behavior. Yeah, like my cousin was capable of good behavior.

And, oh, man was he terrified.

You’re right to be scared, I said, but just find all the Indians and they’ll keep you safe.

But what did I know? The only thing I’d learned about prison was what I’d seen on HBO, A&E, and MSNBC documentaries.

Halfway through his first day in prison, my cousin got into a tussle with the big boss Indian.

Why did you fight him? I asked.

Because he was a white man, Junior said, as fucking pale as snow.

My cousin wasn’t too dark himself but I guess he was dark enough.

That fucker had blue eyes, Junior said, and you know Indians can’t be blue-eyed.

My cousin wasn’t smart enough to know about recessive genes, but he was speaking some truth.

But no matter how Junior felt about that white Indian, he should have kept the peace. He should have looked for the Indian hidden behind those blue eyes.

I tried to explain myself, Junior said. I told him I was just punching the white guy in him.

Like an exorcism, I said when Junior called me collect from the prison pay phone. I think jail is the only place where you can find pay phones anymore.

Yeah, Junior said, I’m a devil-killer.

But here’s the saddest thing: My cousin’s late mother was white. A blonde and blue-eyed Caucasian beauty. Yeah, my cousin is half white. He just won the genetic lottery when he got the black hair and brown eyes. His late brother had the light skin and pale eyes. We used to call them Sunrise and Sundown.

Anyway, my cousin lost his tribal protection damn quick, and halfway through his second day in prison, he was gang-raped by black guys. And halfway through his third day, those black guys sold Junior to an Aryan dude for five cartons of cigarettes.

One thousand cigarettes.

It’s cruel to say, but that doesn’t seem near enough to buy somebody. If it’s going to happen to you, it should cost a lot more, right?

But what do I know about prison economics? Maybe that was a good price. I hoped that it was a good price.

My cousin was pretty. He had the long, black hair and the skinny legs and ass. It didn’t take much to make him look womanly. Just some mascara, lipstick, and prison pants scissored into short shorts.

Suddenly, Junior said, I am Miss Indian USA.

But I’m not gay, he said.

It’s not about being gay, I said, it’s about crazy guys trying to fill you with their pain.

Jesus, Junior said, all these years since Columbus landed and now he’s finally decided to fuck me in the ass.

Yeah, we could laugh about it. What else were we going to do? If you sing the first note of a death song while you’re in prison, you’ll soon be singing the whole damn song every damn day.

For the next three years, I drove down to Walla Walla to visit Junior. At first, it was once or twice a month. Then it became every few months. Then I stopped driving there at all. I accepted his collect calls for the first five years, but then I stopped doing that. And he stopped calling. He disappeared from my life.

Some things happen. Some things don’t.

My cousin served his full ten-year sentence, was released on a Monday, and had to hitchhike back to the reservation.

He showed up at the tribal cafe as I was eating an overcooked hamburger and too-greasy fries. He sat in the chair across the table from me and smiled big and shiny. New false teeth. Looked like he got one good thing out of prison.

Hey, Cousin, he said.

He was way casual for a guy who’d been in prison for ten years and hadn’t heard from me in five.

So, I said, are you really free or did you break out?

It was a hot summer day, but Junior was wearing long sleeves to cover his track marks. He’d graduated from meth to heroin.

We restarted our friendship You could call us cousin-brothers or cousin–best friends. Either works. Both work. He never mentioned my absence from his prison life and I wasn’t about to bring it up.

He got a job working forestry. It was easy work for decent money. Nobody on the rez was interested in punishing the already-punished.

It’s a good job, he said, I drive through all the deep woods on the rez and mark trees that I think should be cut down.

Thing is, he said, we never cut down any trees, so my job is really just driving through the most beautiful place in the world while carrying a box full of spray paint.

He fell in love, too, with Jeri, a white woman who worked as a nurse at the Indian Health Service Clinic. She was round and red-faced, but funny and cute and all tender in the heart, and everybody on the rez liked her. So it felt like a slice of redemption pie.

She listens to me, Junior said. You know how hard that is to find?

Yeah, I said, but do you listen to her?

Junior shrugged his shoulders. Of course he didn’t listen to her. He’d been forced to keep his mouth shut for ten years in prison. It was his turn to talk. And talk he did.

He told me everything about how he sexed her up. Half of me wanted to hear the stories and half of me wanted to close my ears. But I couldn’t stop him. I felt guilty for abandoning him in prison. I owed him patience and grace.

But it was so awful sometimes. He was already sex-drunk and half-mean when he went into prison, but being treated as a fuck-slave for ten years turned him into something worse. I don’t have a name for it, but he talked about sex like he talked about speed and meth and crack and heroin.

She’s my pusher, he said about Jeri, and her pussy is my drug.

He reduced Jeri all the way down to the sacred parts of her anatomy. And those parts stop being sacred when you talk blasphemy about them.

Maybe he wasn’t in love with Jeri, I thought. Maybe he was time-traveling her back to prison with him.

But I also wondered what Jeri was doing with him. From the outside, she looked solid and real, but I think she was broken inside and, for some crazy reason, thought that broken men could fix her.

Things went on like that for a couple of years. He started punching her in the stomach. She hid those bruises beneath her clothes. And she punched him and gave him black eyes that Junior carried around like war paint.

We are Romeo and Juliet, he said.

Yeah, like he’d ever read the book or watched any of those movies more than ten minutes through.

Then, one day, Jeri disappeared.

Rumor had it she went into a battered women’s shelter. Rumor also had it she was hiding in Spokane. Which, if true, was stupid. How can you hide in the City of Spokane from a Spokane Indian?

Six months after she went missing, Junior found her in a 7-Eleven in the Indian part of town.

Yeah, scared as she was of one Indian, she was hiding among other Indians. Yeah, we Indians are addicting. You have to be careful around us because we’ll teach you how to cry epic tears and you’ll never want to stop.

Anyway, you might think he wanted to kill her. Or break some bones. But, no, he was crazy in a whole different way. In the aisle of that 7-Eleven, he dropped to his knees and asked for her hand in marriage.

So, yes, they got married and I was the best man.

In the parking lot after the ceremony, Junior and Jeri smoked meth with a bunch of toothless wonders.

Fucking zombies walking everywhere on the rez.

Monster movie all the time.

A thousand years from now, archaeologists are going to be mystified by all the toothless skulls they find buried in the ancient reservation mud.

Junior and Jeri couldn’t afford a honeymoon so they spent a night in the tribal casino hotel. That’s free for any Indian newlyweds. Mighty generous, I guess, letting tribal members sleep free in the casino they’re supposed to own.

They moved into a trailer house down near Tshimakain Creek and they got all happy and safe for maybe six months.

Then, one night, after she wouldn’t have sex with him, he punched her so hard that he knocked out her front teeth.

That was it for her.

She left him and lived on the rez in plain sight. All proud for leaving, she mocked him by carrying her freedom around like her own kind of war paint. And I loved her for it.

Stand up, woman, I thought, stand up and kick out your demons.

Junior seemed to accept it okay. I should’ve known better, but he talked a good line.

The world is an imperfect place, he said. I don’t know where he got that bit of philosophy but he seemed to believe it.

Then Jeri fell in love with Dr. Bob. He was the general practitioner who also worked at the Indian clinic and was counting the days until he paid off his scholarship and could flee the rez. In the meantime, he’d found a warm body to keep him company during the too-damn-many-Indians night.

Everybody deserves love. Well, almost everybody deserves love. And Jeri certainly needed some brightness, but Dr. Bob was all dark and bitter and accelerated. He punched her in the face on their eleventh date.

Ten minutes after we heard the news, Junior and I were speeding toward Dr. Bob’s house, located right next to the rez border down near the Spokane River. Yeah, he had to live on the rez, but he’d only live fifteen feet past the border.

I’m going to fuck him up, Junior said. You can’t be hitting my woman.

I knew Junior was going to do something very bad. And I should have stopped him. I probably could have stopped him. Instead, I held on to my silence hard. I was a mute man riding shotgun for a bad man looking to hurt another bad man.

All the while he was driving, Junior was snorting whatever he could find within arm’s reach. I think he snorted up spilled sugar and salt. Any powder was good. So he was all feedback and static when we arrived at Dr. Bob’s door.

Junior raced ahead of me and rhino-charged into the house. And, once inside, he pulled a pistol from somewhere and whipped Dr. Bob across the face.

A fucking .45. I’d seen tons of hunting rifles on the rez, but never a pistol like that.

Junior whipped Dr. Bob maybe five times across the face and then kicked him in the balls and threw him against the wall. And Dr. Bob, the so-called healer, slid all injured and bloody to the floor.

You do not fuck with my possessions, Junior said.

There it was. The real reason for all of it. It was hatred and revenge, not love. Maybe at that point, all Junior could see was the Aryan who’d raped him a thousand times. Maybe Junior could only see the white lightning of colonialism. I don’t mean to get so intellectual, but I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to explain what happened. I’m trying to explain myself to myself.

I watched Junior lean over and backhand Dr. Bob. Then again. And again.

He’s had enough, I said, let’s get out of here.

Junior laughed.

Yeah, he said, this fucker will never hit another woman again.

Junior and I walked toward the door together. I thought it was over. But Junior turned back, pressed that pistol against Dr. Bob’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

I will never forget how that head exploded. It was like a comet smashing through a planet.

I couldn’t move. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. But then Junior did something worse. He flipped over the doctor’s body, pulled down his pants and underwear, and shoved that pistol into Dr. Bob’s ass.

Even then, I knew there was some battered train track stretching between Junior’s torture in prison and that violation of Dr. Bob’s body.

No more, I said, no more.

Junior stared at me with such hatred, such pain, that I thought he might kill me, too. But then his eyes filled with something worse: logic.

We have to get rid of the body, he said.

I shook my head. At least, I think I shook my head.

You owe me, he said.

That was it. I couldn’t deny him. I helped him clean up the blood and bone and brain, and wrap Dr. Bob in a blanket, and throw him into the trunk of the car.

I know where to dump him, Junior said.

So we drove deep into the forest, to the end of a dirt road that had started, centuries ago, as a game trail. Then we carried Dr. Bob’s body through the deep woods toward a low canyon that Junior had discovered during his tree-painting job.

Nobody will ever find the body, Junior said.