Sherman Alexie - Blasphemy - New and Selected Stories

“Donkeys got only three talents,” Emery said. “Fucking, braying, and shitting.”

“What about basketball?” Deuce asked.

“For donkeys, everything is fucking, braying, and shitting.”

Deuce wanted to tell his father that all human activity is also about fucking, braying, and shitting, but he knew his father wouldn’t appreciate the joke. His father wasn’t dumb but he lived in a world that did not include metaphors.

There comes a time in every son’s life when he thinks he is smarter than his father. But the truth is that fathers and sons are mostly equal in intelligence. Geniuses beget geniuses and idiots beget idiots. And yet, there also comes a time in a few sons’ lives when it can be proven beyond any doubt that they are very much smarter than their fathers. So, yes, Deuce was the Socrates of the Carter clan. But even Deuce knew that wasn’t saying much because the Carter clan currently consisted of himself, the elder Emery, and twelve donkeys.

Emery Sr. and Emery Jr. were the president and vice president of Carter & Sons, one of two Donkey Basketball outfits in the Pacific Northwest and one of only ten still operating in the United States. Founded by Edgar Carter in the days after he’d come limping home from WWII, it had, for over four decades, provided solid middle-class employment for Edgar, his wife Eileen, and their three sons, Edgar Jr., Edward, and Emery.

The 1950s through early 1980s were the glory days of Donkey Basketball. Every weekend, the Carters and their donkeys traveled to high schools in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and split the gate proceeds 50/50 with the sponsoring organizations. Once in a while, they even found games in Utah, Northern California, Nevada, and western Montana. Donkey Basketball was popular. Donkey Basketball helped high schools raise money for new football uniforms or new trumpets for the band or typewriters for the business classes. Donkey Basketball helped the Masons and Elks raise money for college scholarships or give out toys to poor kids at Christmas or help a war widow fix the roof on her house. Donkey Basketball wasn’t just profitable — it was socially responsible. It was good Christian work, and the Carters happened to be the most dedicated outfit with the most friendly humans and donkeys.

Then came the late ’80s and the concept, the romantic poetry, of Animal Rights, and Donkey Basketball was soon viewed in the same way as slaughtering pigs or injecting hepatitis into lab rats or cutting open the skulls of live monkeys and studying their working brains. It wasn’t fair. The Carters loved their donkeys. They fed and bathed the donkeys. The Carters, as a family, midwifed the births of at least a hundred donkey babies. Their donkeys weren’t just pets. And they weren’t just moneymaking employees. They were family.

By 1991, Carter & Sons went Chapter 11 bankrupt. Edgar and Eileen, married for fifty years, died within days of each other. The older boys, Edgar Jr. and Edward, went looking for work in Alaska and never came back. So that left only Emery to care for a barnful of unemployable donkeys and to try and save the family business. And he’d been saving it for twenty years, gaining and losing two wives in the process, but hanging on to a son, a namesake, who was also his best friend.

After dragging the company out of bankruptcy, Emery and Deuce somehow made enough money each year to feed the donkeys and themselves and to pay for the gas to make it to the various towns that still welcomed Donkey Basketball. And once in a while, they had enough cash to rent a motel rather than sleeping in the truck or driving for hours to get back home or to the next game. Though Emery considered himself a Truman Democrat, he discovered that 99 percent of Donkey Basketball fans were now Republicans and/or reservation Indians. He figured Indians loved basketball and animals in equal measure, and he knew those rez people loved to laugh, but he didn’t understand why Donkey Basketball had suddenly become a nearly exclusive Republican tradition. He decided not to care. Money was money, after all. And his donkeys didn’t give a shit about liberal-vs.-conservative battles, so Emery decided not to care, either. If Emery had thought to own a motto or to issue a mission statement, it would have been: “Donkeys love everybody.”

And it was true. Donkeys did love everybody. And Emery loved everybody, too. He was, in an old-fashioned way, a very decent man. One might have thought to call him chivalrous if that word wasn’t loaded with a history of pistol duels.

But Deuce hated the donkeys. He’d hated them since he could walk and say the word “donkey.” But mostly he hated the fact that he had, through family obligation, dedicated his life to something as inane as Donkey Basketball. He was embarrassed that his job hampered — no, destroyed — his romantic life. After all, what’s the third question any woman asks any potential lover?

— What’s your name?

— Deuce.

— Where you from?

— North of Spokane. Little town called Chewelah.

— So what do you do for a living?

— I run a Donkey Basketball company.

— Donkey Basketball?

— Uh, yeah.

— So you teach donkeys how to play basketball?

— Well, no, we’ve trained the donkeys to carry people around the court. The people play basketball while riding the donkeys.

— So it’s like wheelchair basketball? Except the donkeys are the wheelchairs?

— Well, no, those wheelchair folks are amazing athletes. We don’t usually have athletes in our games. The people are goofs. And the donkeys just wander around the court. Mostly wander. But we got one donkey that’s a natural ballplayer.

— Don’t donkeys make, you know, a mess on the court?

— Yeah, sometimes. Most times, I guess. It’s part of the show. It’s funny. People laugh.

— So who cleans up the mess?

— I do. Mostly. My dad has a bad back so the shoveling isn’t always too good for him.

— So your name is Deuce and you clean it up when donkeys go number two? You’re the Deuce who cleans up the deuce?

— Yeah, I guess.

— Well, um, okay, it was nice to meet you, but I’ve got some friends waiting for me. I have to go. Bye.

It had been nearly a decade since Deuce hadn’t had to pay for sex. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. He was thin and muscular like a slice of beef jerky, and had read a couple thousand books in his life. He was one of those rare men who did not monologue his way through life. Deuce loved conversation, but that still did him no good with women, not even the women who liked Donkey Basketball, because those women tended to be farm wives married to their high school sweethearts who were, in turn, in love with their thousand acres of wheat or lentils or some other damn plant. And it wasn’t like Deuce didn’t try. He always picked the most attractive women — the ones without wedding rings — to ride George Mikan. He wanted to use his most talented donkey as a matchmaker, as a love connection, as an aphrodisiac. But Deuce knew that even the hope of using a donkey as a romantic tool was weird, sad, and doomed.

In fact, it had become so weird, sad, and doomed that Deuce had, without informing his father, enlisted in the Army. After basic training, Deuce, even at the advanced age of thirty-one, was certain to be sent into an active combat zone, but he was desperate enough to believe that getting shot at by angry Muslims was a better deal than refereeing one more game of Donkey Basketball.

The game that very evening had been in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. They were raising money for the Meals on Wheels program for senior citizens. A damn good cause, so Carter & Sons had volunteered to take a 40 percent cut of the proceeds instead of their usual 50. But it turned out the white woman who organized the event was new to the reservation and hadn’t realized it was the same weekend as some special Blackfeet holiday. Deuce hadn’t spent any time with Indians outside of Donkey Basketball, but he’d learned that Indians have more holidays than just about any other group of people. This meant that most of the Blackfeet were busy with holiday activities, so that more people rode the donkeys than watched the game from the stands.