Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

PROTEST

My friend Jimmy was a pale Indian, though all of his brothers and sisters were dark. You might have wondered if Jimmy’s real father was a white guy. Some tribal members did wonder, but Jimmy had the same widow’s peak cowlick as his browner siblings. When he was little and living on the rez, Jimmy got teased a bunch. Other Indians called him Salt or Vanilla or Snow White, so yeah, he was insecure about his pigment. But he never would have admitted to that insecurity. Instead, he pretended to embrace it. He insisted on being called White Eagle Feather, or Eagle for short, like that was his real Indian name. But you don’t get to give yourself an Indian name, so most people ignored his wishes and still called him Jimmy. I was his best friend so I called him Eagle once in a while, but I usually called him Ego.

Yeah, Jimmy caught a lot of shit, even from me. But I was also the one who convinced him to go to Spokane Community College.

We shared a studio apartment in Hillyard, a poor neighborhood near the college, and went to class more often than not. Jimmy and I were studying auto repair and planned on opening a garage after we graduated. It was a small dream, I guess, but Jimmy acted like it was a supertraditional Indian thing.

“A car won’t be a car after we work on it,” he said. “It won’t have horsepower. It will be a powerful horse.”

It was a goofy thing to say, but Jimmy took it seriously. Almost overnight, Jimmy got political. It happens all the time in the Indian world, especially among the pale warriors. I think their radicalism becomes inversely proportional to their skin color. But Jimmy’s transformation was sadder than most. He became a community college rebel and started showing up to auto repair class shirtless and barefoot.

“Shoes were invented by the white man,” he said.

“Come on, Ego,” I said. “I like shoes. Everybody likes shoes.”

But he stopped listening to my advice. He got all weird and fundamental. He became so Indian that he jaywalked constantly. He refused to obey traffic signals and would not defer to moving vehicles.

“My tribal sovereignty isn’t only about the land,” he said. “As an Indian man, it’s also about the sovereignty of my body. And the space around my body. Because I am indigenous, I always get the right of way.”

He also started challenging any white man in a uniform — security guards, cops, and firemen. He gave shit to postal workers.

“Fuck them,” he said. “And their Nazi fucking shorts.”

While running along the Spokane River, he spotted a sheriff’s cruiser in a parking lot and flipped off the two cops inside. The cops recognized the shirtless, barefoot guy slogging along the jogging path.

One cop leaned out and shouted, “Run, Forrest, run.”

The other cop yelled, “Go, Dog, go.”

Jimmy wanted to be taken seriously — he wanted to be feared — so he ran up to the cop car and kicked the driver’s door. Then kicked it again.

The cops scrambled out of their seats, chased and tackled Jimmy.

“You racist bastards,” Jimmy yelled at the confused cops. They couldn’t figure out why a white man was calling two white cops racists. Yeah, Jimmy was feeling oppressed but the cops didn’t even realize he was Indian. They thought he was just another white-trash Hillyard redneck.

A few hours later, Jimmy called me from jail.

“I resisted,” he said. “I’ve started a resistance movement.”

“Come on, Ego,” I said. “And I am not bailing you out.”

“Don’t want bail,” he said. “I’m a political prisoner.”

“You’re an asshole is what you are.”

Then, a day after that, the television told me that a cop had shot and killed a homeless Indian named Harold in downtown Spokane.

“He had a knife,” the cop said.

A carving knife, we learned, about three inches long. The murdered Indian, Harold, trying to reconnect with his culture, had been taking carving lessons at the Indian Center. He came from a tribe that made totem poles. They made canoes. Most of the tribe drank; some drank themselves to death.

“He had a threatening look on his face,” the cop said.

I knew Harold a little bit. Every Indian pretty much knows every other Indian. Harold wasn’t an angry man. That was his face.

I phoned Jimmy to talk about the shooting. But I got his voice mail.

“Damn it,” I said. “Indians are still prey animals, enit? When are they going to stop shooting at us?”

I was so mad at the world that I had to make a joke. I wanted to make Jimmy laugh.

“You see, Ego,” I said, “looking as white as you can be is a good thing. Ain’t no cop going to shoot you because he thinks you’re an angry redskin.”

Later, I realized it had been a terrible thing to say, so I called him back and apologized to his machine. A few days after that, I called and apologized to his machine again. After a few months of silence, I called him but his phone was disconnected. I asked around town about him, but nobody knew where he was. I never heard from him or of him again.

Jimmy’s last act was to disappear, and that was probably the most Indian thing he had ever done.