Sherman Alexie: Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

On Mike’s forehead, a white scar running from temple to temple like the horizon.

“Only worked that job long enough to buy me a snowboard,” he said. “Hitchhiked to Stevens Pass. Hitchhiked up a mountain. How crazy is that? Anyway, my first run, I plow into this old dude. And we tumble and slide down the hill together and somehow his ski slices my forehead. Took seventy-five stitches to sew it up. Old dude broke his leg, but wasn’t too freaked about it. Said it was just the way skiing goes sometimes. Cool old dude.”

Mike’s right ear was cauliflowered like a boxer’s.

“It looks like an alien is fucking my earhole,” he said. “But people don’t mess with me because of it. They think I’m some mixed-martial artist who will spinning-backfist them into the hospital.

“My father did it,” he said. “First time, I was maybe seven, and I dropped my orange juice on the kitchen floor, and he slapped me on the side of my head. Knocked me out. Woke up, my ear swollen and all bloody and funny-color bruised. You know what I said to my mom? I told her my ear had a black eye.

“Yeah, my mom knew my dad hit me,” he said. “She never did anything about it. But that’s okay. Nobody else did anything about it, either.

“Dad kept hitting the same ear,” he said. “He kept hitting me whenever he was pissed. And he was pissed all the time. Hit me maybe fifty times over the years.

“It’s my right ear,” he said, “because my dad was left-handed.

“Last time he hit me was the night I graduated from high school,” he said. “He was drunk and kept pushing at me. Kept asking me if I thought I was too good for him now. Kept saying I thought I’d taken a shit on the moon. And then I told him I was going to community college and he hit me. But I was bigger than I used to be. Same size as him. And I was younger and sober. So, yeah, I just kicked his ass out the front door and onto the lawn. Had an audience after a while.

“And nobody stopped me, either,” Mike said. “Not my mom. Not even Pastor Arnold. Because they all knew for years that dad was beating on me, and none of them did a thing to stop him. And now I was getting revenge. And they were okay with that. All they could do was call the ambulance after I was done.

“Got five years for manslaughter,” he said. “Out early for good behavior. Got my bachelor’s degree in education. I want to teach high school. But no way in hell they’ll let an ex-con teach in a real school. No way they’ll let me teach white kids. So I moved back to the rez. Back in with my mother.

“Sometimes,” he said, “she asks me why I had to kill him. She still misses him.

“And sometimes,” he said, “she rubs this lotion on my ear. It’s some miracle medicine that’s supposed to make scars go away. I don’t tell her that shit might have worked when I was ten, but it ain’t going to work now. This ear is going to look like this forever.

“And, yeah,” Mike said, “prison was horrible at first. I got scars way deep inside. But things got better as soon as the other Indians realized I was Indian, too. They saw my blond hair and blue eyes, you know, and thought I was just another Aryan. The real Aryans thought I was one of them, too. But I speak my tribal language, man, and I play drum and sing. So I just walked up to the Indians gathered in the prison yard. And I clapped my hands together like a drum and I sang a powwow song, northern style, maybe a little too fast because I was nervous.

“And, man, oh, man,” he said. “Did those Indians laugh and cheer and war-whoop it up when I was done. And this one elder, with these long, gray braids and about ten thousand tattoos, he calls for quiet. And all these hard-ass Indians shut up because they respect the elder. And he says to me and everybody else, he says, the Creator has gifted us with a half-breed who can sing full-blood.

“So Full-Blood became my prison name,” Mike said. “Funny as shit, right? A blond Indian named Full-Blood. And, let me tell you, I sang ten thousand songs in prison, even sang for the governor, this tiny white woman, when she came to visit.

“Before I sang, she asked me what crime I’d committed,” he said. “And that’s a question you don’t ask or answer in prison. But I figure, Hey, she’s the Governor, so I tell her the truth. I tell her I manslaughtered my father. That I punched him to death because he punched me for years. And the governor leans in close to me, so close I could feel her breath on my ear, and she says, she says, she says, Good for you.

“Can you believe that shit?” Mike asked. “I couldn’t even respond. But let me tell you this. If they ever let ex-cons vote, I’m going to vote for that governor. I’ll vote for her no matter what she’s running for. You see? I finally understand this damn country. I finally know who should lead us. It’s got to be somebody who is equal parts revenge and forgiveness. Somebody who is equal parts love and blood.

“Do you know what I mean?” Mike asked. “Please tell me you know what I mean.”

Being a Spokane Indian, I only pick up Indian hitchhikers.

I learned this particular ceremony from my father, a Coeur d’Alene, who always stopped for those twentieth-century aboriginal nomads who refused to believe the salmon were gone. I don’t know what they believed in exactly, but they wore hope like a bright shirt.

My father never taught me about hope. Instead, he continually told me that our salmon — our hope — would never come back, and though such lessons may seem cruel, I know enough to cover my heart in any crowd of white people.

“They’ll kill you if they get the chance,” my father said. “Love you or hate you, white people will shoot you in the heart. Even after all these years, they’ll still smell the salmon on you, the dead salmon, and that will make white people dangerous.”

All of us, Indian and white, are haunted by salmon.

When I was a boy, I leaned over the edge of one dam or another — perhaps Long Lake or Little Falls or the great gray dragon known as the Grand Coulee — and watched the ghosts of the salmon rise from the water to the sky and become constellations.

For most Indians, stars are nothing more than white tombstones scattered across a dark graveyard.

But the Indian hitchhikers my father picked up refused to admit the existence of sky, let alone the possibility that salmon might be stars. They were common people who believed only in the thumb and the foot. My father envied those simple Indian hitchhikers. He wanted to change their minds about salmon; he wanted to break open their hearts and see the future in their blood. He loved them.

In 1975 or ’76 or ’77, driving along one highway or another, my father would point out a hitchhiker standing beside the road a mile or two in the distance.

“Indian,” he said if it was an Indian, and he was never wrong, though I could never tell if the distant figure was male or female, let alone Indian or not.

If a distant figure happened to be white, my father would drive by without comment.

That was how I learned to be silent in the presence of white people.

The silence is not about hate or pain or fear. Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times. Perhaps a thousand white families are still waiting for their sons and daughters to return home, and can’t recognize them when they float back as morning fog.

“We better stop,” my mother said from the passenger seat. She was one of those Spokane women who always wore a purple bandanna tied tightly around her head.

These days, her bandanna is usually red. There are reasons, motives, traditions behind the choice of color, but my mother keeps them secret.