Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

I wander the streets with a regular crew-my teammates, my defenders, my posse. It's Rose of Sharon, Junior, and me. We matter to each other if we don’t matter to anybody else. Rose of Sharon is a big woman, about seven feet tall if you’re measuring over-all effect and about five feet tall if you’re only talking about the physical. She's a Yakama Indian of the Wishram variety. Junior is a Colville, but there are about a hundred and ninety-nine tribes that make up the Colville, so he could be anything. He's good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement. He's got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he's the Before Columbus Arrived Indian and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian. I am living proof of the horrible damage that colonialism has done to us Skins. But I’m not going to let you know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways. I’m a strong man, and I know that silence is the best method of dealing with white folks.

This whole story really started at lunchtime, when Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I were panning the handle down at Pike Place Market. After about two hours of negotiating, we earned five dollars-good enough for a bottle of fortified courage from the most beautiful 7-Eleven in the world. So we headed over that way, feeling like warrior drunks, and we walked past this pawnshop I’d never noticed before. And that was strange, because we Indians have built-in pawnshop radar. But the strangest thing of all was the old powwow-dance regalia I saw hanging in the window.

“That's my grandmother's regalia,” I said to Rose of Sharon and Junior.

“How you know for sure?” Junior asked.

I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever. I’d only seen photographs of my grandmother dancing in it. And those were taken before somebody stole it from her, fifty years ago. But it sure looked like my memory of it, and it had all the same color feathers and beads that my family sewed into our powwow regalia.

“There's only one way to know for sure,” I said.

So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the old white man working behind the counter.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“That's my grandmother's powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Somebody stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been searching for it ever since.”

The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops are filled with liars.

“I’m not lying,” I said. “Ask my friends here. They’ll tell you.”

“He's the most honest Indian I know,” Rose of Sharon said.

“All right, honest Indian,” the pawnbroker said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Can you prove it's your grandmother's regalia?”

Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on our regalia. But we always hid it so that you had to search really hard to find it.

“If it really is my grandmother’s,” I said, “there will be one yellow bead hidden somewhere on it.”

“All right, then,” the pawnbroker said. “Let's take a look.”

He pulled the regalia out of the window, laid it down on the glass counter, and we searched for that yellow bead and found it hidden beneath the armpit.

“There it is,” the pawnbroker said. He didn’t sound surprised. “You were right. This is your grandmother's regalia.”

“It's been missing for fifty years,” Junior said.

“Hey, Junior,” I said. “It's my family's story. Let me tell it.”

“All right,” he said. “I apologize. You go ahead.”

“It's been missing for fifty years,” I said.

“That's his family's sad story,” Rose of Sharon said. “Are you going to give it back to him?”

“That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t just give away a thousand dollars.”

“We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.

“Hey,” I said to her. “Don’t go threatening people.”

The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking about the possibilities.

“Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said.”

He sounded sad about that. As if he was sorry for taking advantage of our disadvantages.

“What's your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.

“Jackson,” I said.

“Is that first or last?”

“Both,” I said.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, it's true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jackson. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family is funny.”

“All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a thousand dollars, would you?”

“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.

“That's too bad,” he said, and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar.

That would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”

“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.

“That's too bad,” he said once more, and thought harder about the possibilities. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow with the money and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”

“It sounds all right,” I said.

“All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here's twenty bucks.”

He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. And Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.

Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7-Eleven and bought three bottles of imagination. We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in only one day. Thinking hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off those bottles-one, two, and three.

Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke up. I heard later that she had hitchhiked back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.

Junior had passed out beside me and was covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else's vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him alone and walked down to the water. I love the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.

When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins, who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen North ever since.

These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back. “How long has your boat been gone?” I asked. “Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said. I cried with them for a while.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?” They didn’t.