Sherman Alexie - Blasphemy - New and Selected Stories

I kneeled beside the man’s body. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I’d killed a man — by accident, yes, but it was still murder. I’d shot him in the back of the head. The bullet had torn through his brain and exited out his face, exploding it into a bloody maw. He was unrecognizable.

I’d never been a cruel man but I’d often been drunk and stupid. I’d spent two years in jail for robbing a bowling alley with a water pistol that looked like a gun and six months for stealing a go-cart from an amusement park and crashing it into a police car in the parking lot. I wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind and nobody, not even the cop in the police cruiser that I’d slightly dented, would have ever considered me dangerous.

But now, I had killed a man and I knew I would spend real time in a real prison for it. Probably not for murder but certainly for manslaughter. So I did what I thought I should do to save myself. I dragged that man’s body back to his pot field and buried him in the middle of it. If he was ever discovered, I figured the police would think that he was killed by his partners or by a rival pot-growing operation.

After I buried him, I walked the two miles back to my truck and drove the twelve miles back to the house that I shared with my brother.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“One shot,” I said. “And one miss.”

For the next year, I was terrified that the body would be discovered. I scanned the newspapers for news of missing men. Missing criminals. Missing drug dealers. And, sure, a few bad guys disappeared, as they always do, but they also disappeared from the news pretty quickly.

After a few more years, it began to feel like the event had never happened. It felt like a movie that I must have watched at three in the morning in a motel next to a freeway.

Then, twenty-one years after I’d killed the man, I went to the tribal clinic with a bad cough and discovered that I had terminal cancer. My body was a museum of cancer; there was a tumor exhibition in every nook and cranny.

“Three months if you’re unlucky,” the doctor said. “Six months if you bump into a miracle.”

So what does a dying man do about the worst sin of his life? I didn’t confess. I was still too cowardly to do that. And I didn’t want to spend my last days in court or jail.

But I felt the need to atone.

So, in my weakened state, I drove along that familiar logging road, and slowly climbed back to that ridge where I’d shot and killed a man. The pot field had grown wild and huge. How had it survived winter and freezing temperatures? And how fast does pot grow? How many generations of the plants can live and die in a two-decade span? I didn’t know, but I had to crawl through a pot jungle to the spot where I’d buried that white guy.

And, bit by bit, handful by handful, I dug up his body.

His tattered clothes were draped over brown bones. His skull was a collapsed sinkhole. I was surprised that animals hadn’t dug him up and spread the remains far and wide. I stared at him for a long time.

Then I sang a death song for him. And an honor song for the family and friends who never knew what had happened to him.

Then I took his skull, carefully wrapped it in newspaper, slid it into my backpack, crawled out of the pot garden, and walked back to my truck.

It was late when I returned to my house. My brother had long ago married a Lakota woman and moved to South Dakota. I was alone in the world. And I would soon be dead. I stripped naked and carried the dead man’s skull into the shower with me. I cleaned my body and the dead man’s skull.

Then I put on my favorite T-shirt and sweatpants and set the skull on the TV in my bedroom. I lay on the bed and stared at that crushed face.

I wanted to be haunted. But that skull did not speak to me. I wanted that skull to be more than a dead man’s skull. I wanted it to be a hive abandoned by its wasps, or a shell left behind by its insect, or a husk peeled from its vegetable, or a planet knocked free of its orbit, or the universe collapsing around me.

But the skull was only the reminder that I had killed a man. It was proof that I had lived and would die without magnificence. God, I wanted to be forgiven, but an apology offered to a dead man is only a selfish apology to yourself.

The hummingbirds swarmed my garden, randomly at first, but then hovered and formed themselves into midair letters. It took seventeen hummingbirds to make an “A” and twenty-eight to make a “W.” In this way, feather by feather, letter by letter, the hummingbirds spelled my mother’s full name.

I hadn’t called her for at least a month, so it was obvious these birds had come to remind me of family duties.

“Hello, Mother,” I said.

“Who is this?” she asked. “The voice is so familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

“It’s me,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Who is this again?”

“It’s your son.”

“Which son?” she asked.

“The distant one,” I said.

“It took you long enough,” she said. “I sent those hummingbirds last Friday.”

“They flew in maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

“Damn hummingbirds,” she said. “How can animals that quick always be so late?”

“You could have just used the phone.”

“And you would have let it go to voice mail. Like you always do.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You’ve got my full attention now. What’s up?”

“You promised you’d send my granddaughters’ school photos.”

“Oh, shit, Mom, I forgot again. I’ll mail them out today.”

“You said that the last time.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “It would be so much easier if you got a computer. Then I could e-mail them to you.”

“Ah, I don’t need anything fancy like that,” she said. “And I don’t understand how they work anyway.”

“I’ll head to the post office right after I hang up. I’ll overnight the photos.”

“They better be here,” she said. “Or I’m going to send the hornets. And you know how mean and disciplined they are.”

“And what are you going to make them spell for me?”

“They’re just going to swarm your house and spell the word ‘guilt’ everywhere. Those hornets are going to be like miniature Catholic priests. And they’re going to sting, sting, sting.”

I laughed; she laughed. I mailed the photos twenty minutes after I got off the phone with her. But she still sent a few dozen hornets. They didn’t arrive angry. Instead, they settled on my shoulders and murmured something that I couldn’t quite hear.

So, yes, as you might imagine, I am jealous of my mother’s magic. And I am jealous of my three daughters. They can make the tallest pine trees lean close, pick them up with their branches, and lift them high into the city sky.

As the years have passed, my daughters have spent more and more time up among the highest branches. They are soon going to leave me as I long ago left my mother. But I fled my family on foot. My daughters will be carried by trees back to my reservation to live with my mother, their grandmother. And our people will celebrate. The trees that transported my daughters will happily accept flame. And they will burn. And their smoke will rise into the dark and spell words from the tribal language that I never learned to speak.

On Wednesday afternoon in the student union café, Corliss looked up from her American history textbook and watched a young man and younger woman walk in together and sit two tables away. The student union wasn’t crowded, so Corliss clearly heard the young couple’s conversation. He offered her coffee from his thermos, but she declined. Hurt by her rejection, or feigning pain — he always carried two cups because well, you never know, do you? — he poured himself one, sipped and sighed with theatrical pleasure, and monologued. The young woman slumped in her seat and listened. He told her where he was from and where he wanted to go after college, and how much he liked these books and those teachers but hated those movies and these classes, and it was all part of an ordinary man’s list-making attempts to seduce an ordinary woman. Blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, and thin, she hid her incipient bulimia beneath a bulky wool sweater. Corliss wanted to buy the skeletal woman a sandwich, ten sandwiches, and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Eat, young woman, eat, Corliss thought, and you will be redeemed! The young woman set her backpack on the table and crossed her arms over her chest, but the young man didn’t seem to notice or care about the defensive meaning of her body language. He talked and talked and gestured passionately with long-fingered hands. A former lover, an older woman, had probably told him his hands were artistic, so he assumed all women would be similarly charmed. He wore his long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and a flowered blue shirt that was really a blouse; he was narcissistic, androgynous, lovely, and yes, charming. Corliss thought she might sleep with him if he took her home to a clean apartment, but she decided to hate him instead. She knew she judged people based on their surface appearances, but Lord Byron said only shallow people don’t judge by surfaces. So Corliss thought of herself as Byronesque as she eavesdropped on the young couple. She hoped one of these ordinary people might say something interesting and original. She believed in the endless nature of human possibility. She would be delighted if these two messy humans transcended their stereotypes and revealed themselves as mortal angels.