Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

OLD GROWTH

In 1989, while hunting on the Spokane Indian Reservation, I saw a quick flash of movement on the ridge above me, spun, aimed high, and fired my rifle. I’d been hunting deer since childhood and had shot and missed twenty-seven times over the years. I was widely recognized as the worst hunter in reservation history. But, on that day, I didn’t miss. At the advanced age of twenty-six, I thought I’d killed my first deer and was extremely excited as I climbed that ridge to claim my kill. But I hadn’t shot a deer. I’d shot and killed a white guy who’d been tending to the field of marijuana he’d planted deep in the reservation woods. White guys did that because the reservation cops never ventured off the paved roads and federal agents didn’t want to deal with the complicated laws surrounding tribal sovereignty and police jurisdiction.

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.