The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

THE FUN HOUSE

IN THE TRAILER BY Tshimikain Creek where my cousins and I used to go crazy in the mud, my aunt waited. She sewed to pass the time, made beautiful buckskin outfits that no one could afford, and once she made a full-length beaded dress that was too heavy for anyone to wear.

“It’s just like the sword in the stone,” she said. “When a woman comes along who can carry the weight of this dress on her back, then we’ll have found the one who will save us all.”

One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt’s sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.

She pulled her body into the air, reached down her pants, unbuttoned them, tried to pull them off, but they stuck around the hips.

“Jesus, Jesus,” she cried while her husband and son rolled with laughter on the floor.

“Get it out, get it out,” she yelled some more while her husband ran over and smacked her legs in an effort to smash the mouse dead.

“Not that way,” she cried again and again.

All the noise and laughter and tears frightened the mouse even more, and he ran down my aunt’s pant leg, out the door and into the fields.

In the aftermath, my aunt hiked her pants back up and cursed her son and husband.

“Why didn’t you help me?” she asked.

Her son couldn’t stop laughing.

“I bet when that mouse ran up your pant leg, he was thinking, What in the hell kind of mousetraps do they got now?” her husband said.

“Yeah,” her son agreed. “When he got up there, he probably said to himself, That’s the ugliest mousetrap I’ve ever seen!”

“Stop it, you two,” she yelled. “Haven’t you got any sense left?”

“Calm down,” my uncle said. “We’re only teasing you.”

“You’re just a couple of ungrateful shits,” my aunt said. “Where would you be if I didn’t cook, if my fry bread didn’t fill your stomachs every damn night?”

“Momma,” her son said. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And I didn’t mean to give birth to you. Look at you. Thirty years old and no job except getting drunk. What good are you?”

“That’s enough,” her husband yelled.

“It’s never enough,” my aunt said and walked outside, stood in the sun, and searched the sky for predators of any variety. She hoped some falcon or owl would find the mouse and she hoped some pterodactyl would grab her husband and son.

Bird feed, she thought. They’d make good bird feed.

In the dark my aunt and her husband were dancing. Thirty years ago and they two-stepped in an Indian cowboy bar. So many Indians in one place and it was beautiful then. All they needed to survive was the drive home after closing time.

“Hey, Nezzy,” a voice cried out to my aunt. “You still stepping on toes?”

My aunt smiled and laughed. She was a beautiful dancer, had given lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio to pay her way through community college. She had also danced topless in a Seattle bar to put food in her child’s stomach.

There are all kinds of dancing.

“Do you love me?” my aunt asked her husband.

He smiled. He held her closer, tighter. They kept dancing.

After closing time, they drove home on the back roads.

“Be careful,” my aunt told her husband. “You drank too much tonight.”

He smiled. He put his foot to the fire wall and the pickup staggered down the dirt road, went on two wheels on a sharp corner, flipped, and slid into the ditch.

My aunt crawled out of the wreck, face full of blood, and sat on the roadside. Her husband had been thrown out of the pickup and lay completely still in the middle of the road.

“Dead? Knocked out? Passed out?” my aunt asked herself.

After a while, another car arrived and stopped. They wrapped an old shirt around my aunt’s head and loaded her husband into the backseat.

“Is he dead?” my aunt asked.

“Nah, he’ll be all right.”

They drove that way to the tribal hospital. My aunt bled into the shirt; her husband slept through his slight concussion. They kept him overnight for observation, and my aunt slept on a cot beside his bed. She left the television on with the volume turned off.

At sunrise my aunt shook her husband awake.

“What?” he asked, completely surprised. “Where am I?”

“In the hospital.”

“Again?”

“Yeah, again.”

Thirty years later and they still hadn’t paid the bill for services rendered.

My aunt walked down her dirt road until she was dizzy. She walked until she stood on the bank of Tshimikain Creek. The water was brown, smelled a little of dead animal and uranium. My cousins and I dove into these waters years ago to pull colored stones from the muddy bottom and collect them in piles beside the creek. My aunt stood beside one of those ordinary monuments to childhood and smiled a little, cried a little.

“One dumb mouse tears apart the whole damn house,” she said. Then she stripped off her clothes, kept her shoes on for safety, and dove naked into the creek. She splashed around, screamed in joy as she waded through. She couldn’t swim but the creek was shallow, only just past her hips. When she sat down the surface rested just below her chin, so whenever she moved she swallowed a mouthful of water.

“I’ll probably get sick,” she said and laughed just as her husband and son arrived at the creek, out of breath.

“What the hell are you doing?” her husband asked.

“Swimming.”

“But you don’t know how to swim.”

“I do now.”

“Get out of there before you drown,” her husband said. “And get some clothes on.”

“I’m not coming out until I want to,” my aunt said, and she floated up on her back for the first time.

“You can’t do that,” her son yelled now. “What if somebody sees you?”

“I don’t care,” my aunt said. “They can all go to hell, and you two can drive the buses that get them there.”

Her husband and son threw their hands up in surrender, walked away.

“And cook your own damn dinner,” my aunt yelled at their backs.

She floated on the water like that for hours, until her skin wrinkled and her ears filled with water. She kept her eyes closed and could barely hear when her husband and son came back every so often to plead with her.

“One dumb mouse tore apart the whole damn house. One dumb mouse tore apart the whole damn house,” she chanted at them, sang it like a nursery rhyme, like a reservation Mother Goose.

The delivery room was a madhouse, a fun house. The Indian Health Service doctor kept shouting at the nurses.

“Goddamn it,” he yelled. “I’ve never done this before. You’ve got to help me.”

My aunt was conscious, too far into delivery for drugs, and she was screaming a little bit louder than the doctor.

“Shit, shit, fuck,” she yelled and grabbed onto the nurses, the doctors, kicked at her stirrups. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!”

Her son slid out of her then and nearly slipped through the doctor’s hands. The doctor caught him by an ankle and held on tightly.

“It’s a boy,” he said. “Finally.”

A nurse took the baby, held it upside down as she cleared his mouth, wiped his body almost clean. My aunt took her upside-down son with only one question: Will he love to eat potatoes?

While my aunt held her baby close to her chest, the doctor tied her tubes, with the permission slip my aunt signed because the hospital administrator lied and said it proved her Indian status for the BIA.

“What are you going to name it?” a nurse asked my aunt. “Potatoes,” she said. “Or maybe Albert.”

When the sun went down and the night got too cold, my aunt finally surrendered the water of Tshimikain Creek, put clothes on her damp and tired body, and walked up her road toward home. She looked at the bright lights shining in the windows, listened to the dogs bark stupidly, and knew that things had to change.

She walked into the house, didn’t say a word to her stunned husband and son, and pulled that heaviest of beaded dresses over her head. Her knees buckled and she almost fell from the weight; then she did fall.

“No,” she said to her husband and son as they rose to help her.

She stood, weakly. But she had the strength to take the first step, then another quick one. She heard drums, she heard singing, she danced.

Dancing that way, she knew things were beginning to change.