Sherman Alexie - Blasphemy - New and Selected Stories

Because of all that, my father always remembered the second before my mother left him for good and took me with her. No. I remembered the second before my father left my mother and me. No. My mother remembered the second before my father left her to finish raising me all by herself.

But however memory actually worked, it was my father who climbed on his motorcycle, waved to me as I stood in the window, and rode away. He lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, before he finally ended up in Phoenix. For a while, I got postcards nearly every week. Then it was once a month. Then it was on Christmas and my birthday.

On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation can work.

My mother did her best to explain it all to me, although I understood most of what happened.

“Was it because of Jimi Hendrix?” I asked her.

“Part of it, yeah,” she said. “This might be the only marriage broken up by a dead guitar player.”

“There’s a first time for everything, enit?”

“I guess. Your father just likes being alone more than he likes being with other people. Even men and you.”

Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She’d get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt.

On those nights I missed him most I listened to music. Not always Jimi Hendrix. Usually I listened to the blues. Robert Johnson mostly. The first time I heard Robert Johnson sing I knew he understood what it meant to be Indian on the edge of the twenty-first century, even if he was black at the beginning of the twentieth. That must have been how my father felt when he heard Jimi Hendrix. When he stood there in the rain at Woodstock.

Then on the night I missed my father most, when I lay in bed and cried, with that photograph of him beating that National Guard private in my hands, I imagined his motorcycle pulling up outside. I knew I was dreaming it all but I let it be real for a moment.

“Victor,” my father yelled. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“I’ll be right down. I need to get my coat on.”

I rushed around the house, pulled my shoes and socks on, struggled into my coat, and ran outside to find an empty driveway. It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away. I stood on the porch and waited until my mother came outside.

“Come on back inside,” she said. “It’s cold.”

“No,” I said. “I know he’s coming back tonight.”

My mother didn’t say anything. She just wrapped me in her favorite quilt and went back to sleep. I stood on the porch all night long and imagined I heard motorcycles and guitars, until the sun rose so bright that I knew it was time to go back inside to my mother. She made breakfast for both of us and we ate until we were full.

Thirty-one years ago, just after I’d graduated from college, I had sex with a teenage Indian boy. I was twenty-three and the boy was seventeen. In the State of Washington, the age of consent is sixteen, but since I was more than five years older than him and in a supervisory position, I was guilty of sexual misconduct, though my crime was never discovered.

I don’t think I was a predator. It was only the third time I’d slept with somebody, but the boy told me he’d already had sex with twelve different girls.

“I’m a champion powwow fancydancer,” he said. “And fancy-dancers are the rock stars of the Indian world. We have groupies.”

Please don’t think I’m trying to justify my actions. But I’m fairly certain that I didn’t hurt that Indian boy, either physically or spiritually. At least, I hope that he remembers me with more fondness than pain.

I was a middle-class white girl who’d volunteered to spend a summer on an Indian reservation. Any Indian reservation. I foolishly thought that Indians needed my help. I was arrogant enough to think they deserved my help.

My Indian boy was poor and learning-disabled, and he could barely read, but he was gorgeous and strong and kind and covered his mouth when he laughed, as if he were embarrassed to be enjoying the world. I was slender and pretty, and eager to lift him out of poverty, and so ready to save his life, but ended up naked in a wheat field with him.

The sex didn’t last long. And I cried afterward.

“Your skin is so pretty and pale,” he said. “Thank you for letting me touch you.”

He was a sweet and poetic boy for somebody so young. We held each other tightly and didn’t let go even as the ants crawled on us.

“It’s okay,” he said. “They won’t bite us.”

And they didn’t.

I’m not a Catholic but I would still like to make this official confession: I feel great shame for what I did to that boy. But do you know what makes it worse? I don’t remember his name.

Three years ago, I was living in a prefurnished corporate apartment in Phoenix, Arizona. You’ve heard of the company I work for. You probably own many of its products.

It was July and the sand invaded my apartment and car and mouth. All day long, I swigged and gargled water to clean the grit from between my teeth.

My coworkers didn’t get sand in their teeth so they thought I was imagining it. They teased me and wondered if the heat was driving me crazy. I wondered if they were correct.

I was born and grew up on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula between a rain forest and a saltwater strait. My parents loved the place so much that they named me BlueGrouse, a bird only found in our rain forest. Lucky me. So, of course, as soon as I turned eighteen, I legally changed my first name to Melissa, the second most common one in the United States that year. In partial honor of my parents, I did keep Blue, but lopped off Grouse, as my middle name.

In any event, a woman originally named for a slug-eating bird doesn’t belong in the desert.

One morning late in July, the temperature was already over 100 degrees at dawn. And, minute by minute, it was only getting hotter. I could have hidden in the air-conditioned apartment, but I’d felt the need to challenge myself. I wanted to see how long I could endure that heat.

I was dizzy after a few minutes. And I was so thirsty that everything — the buildings, cars, and mountains — glistened like bottles of water.

And then I saw it.

To the east of the city. And approaching fast.

A massive wave of sand.

It stretched hundreds of feet into the air. And it was at least thirty miles wide.

All around me, my neighbors — none of whom I knew but who must have been watching the morning news — had stepped out onto their decks to stare.

“What is that?” one neighbor shouted to nobody in particular.

“A haboob,” somebody else shouted.

“What’s a haboob?”

“It’s Arabic.”

“Okay, it’s Arabic, but what does it mean?”

“The rough translation is ‘big fucking sandstorm.’”

As it rolled closer, the haboob swallowed the city. I wondered if it was strong enough to destroy buildings. Could the sand be propelled with such force that it stripped metal from cars and skin from humans?

I imagined that a million people — sudden skeletons — were buried and would remain so until an archaeologist discovered them centuries from now.

My neighbors fled back into their apartments, but I remained on my deck and waited for the storm. I welcomed it. But as the wind blew down power lines and exploded a few transformers, I was forced to retreat and watch the storm through the sliding glass door until a fine layer of dust obscured my view.