The Toughest Indian in the World

CLASS

SHE WANTED TO KNOW if I was Catholic.

I was completely unprepared to respond with any degree of clarity to such a dangerous question. After all, we had been talking about the shrimp appetizers (which were covered with an ambitious pesto sauce) and where they fit, in terms of quality, in our very separate histories of shrimp appetizers in particular and seafood appetizers in general. I’d just been describing to her how cayenne and lobster seemed to be mortal enemies, one of the more secular and inane culinary observations I’d ever made, when she’d focused her blue eyes on me, really looked at me for the first time in the one minute and thirty-five seconds we’d known each other, and asked me if I was Catholic.

How do you answer a question like that, especially when you’ve just met the woman at one of those house parties where you’d expected to know everybody in attendance but had gradually come to realize that you knew only the host couple, and then only well enough to ask about the welfare of the two kids (a boy and a girl or two boys) you thought they parented? As far as I could tell, there were no priests, ministers, or pastors milling about, so I had no easy visual aids in guessing at the dominant denomination in the room. If there’d been a Jesuit priest, Hasidic rabbi, or Tibetan monk drinking a pale ale over by the saltwater aquarium, I might have known the best response, the clever, scintillating answer that would have compelled her to take me home with her for a long night of safe and casual sex.

“Well,” she asked again, with a musical lilt in her voice. “Are you Catholic?”

Her left eye was a significantly darker blue than the right.

“Your eyes,” I said, trying to change the subject. “They’re different.”

“I’m blind in this one,” she said, pointing to the left eye.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, mortified by my lack of decorum.

“Why? It was my big brother who stabbed me with the pencil. He didn’t mean it, though.”

She told the story as if she’d only skinned a knee or received a slight concussion, as if the injury had been temporary.

“He was aiming for my little sister’s eye,” she added. “But she ducked. She was always more athletic than me.”

“Where’s your sister now?”

“She’s dead. Car wreck. Bang, bang, bang.”

So much pain for such a white woman. I wondered how often a man can say the wrong thing during the course of a particular conversation.

“What about your brother?” I asked, praying that he had not been driving the car that killed her sister.

“He’s right over there,” she said and pointed at a handsome man, taller than everybody else in the room, who was sitting on the carpeted stairs with a woman whose red hair I’d been admiring all evening. Though engaged in what appeared to be a passionate conversation, the brother sensed his sister’s attention and looked up. Both of his eyes were the same shade of blue as her good eye.

“He’s the one who did it,” she said and tapped her blind eye.

In response, the brother smiled and tapped his left eye. He could see perfectly.

“You cruel bastard,” she mouthed at him, though she made it sound like an affectionate nickname, like a tender legacy from childhood.

“You cruel bastard,” she repeated. Her brother could obviously read her lips because he laughed again, loud enough for me to hear him over the din of the party, and hugged the redhead in a tender but formal way that indicated they’d made love only three or four times in their young relationship.

“Your brother,” I said, trying to compliment her by complimenting the family genetics. “He’s good-looking.”

“He’s okay,” she said.

“He’s got your eyes.”

“Only one of them, remember,” she said and moved one step closer to me. “Now, quit trying to change the subject. Tell me. Are you Catholic or are you not Catholic?”

“Baptized,” I said. “But not confirmed.”

“That’s very ambiguous.”

“I read somewhere that many women think ambiguity is sexy.”

“Not me. I like men who are very specific.”

“You don’t like mystery?”

“I always know who did it,” she said and moved so close that I could smell the red wine and dinner mints on her breath.

I took a step back.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m not drunk. And I just chewed on a few Altoids because I thought I might be kissing somebody very soon.”

She could read minds. She was also drunk enough that her brother had already pocketed the keys to her Lexus.

“Who is this somebody you’re going to be kissing?” I asked. “And why just somebody? That sounds very ambiguous to me.”

“And very sexy,” she said and touched my hand. Blond, maybe thirty-five, and taller than me, she was the tenth most attractive white woman in the room. I always approached the tenth most attractive white woman at any gathering. I didn’t have enough looks, charm, intelligence, or money to approach anybody more attractive than that, and I didn’t have enough character to approach the less attractive. Crassly speaking, I’d always made sure to play ball only with my equals.

“You’re Indian,” she said, stretching the word into three syllables and nearly a fourth.

“Do you like that?”

“I like your hair,” she said, touching the black braids that hung down past my chest. I’d been growing the braids since I’d graduated from law school. My hair impressed jurors but irritated judges. Perfect.

“I like your hair, too,” I said and brushed a pale strand away from her forehead. I counted three blemishes and one mole on her face. I wanted to kiss the tips of her fingers. Women expected kisses on the parts of their bodies hidden by clothes, the private places, but were often surprised when I paid more attention to their public features: hands, hairline, the soft skin around their eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m just pretty. But pretty is good enough.”

I still didn’t know her name, but I could have guessed at it. Her generation of white women usually carried two-syllable names, like Becky, Erin, and Wendy, or monosyllabic nicknames that lacked any adornment. Peg, Deb, or Sam. Efficient names, quick-in-the-shower names, just-brush-it-and-go names. Her mother and her mother’s friends would be known by more ornate monikers, and if she had daughters, they would be named after their grandmothers. The country was filling up with little white girls named Rebecca, Elizabeth, and Willamena.

“Sara,” I guessed. “Your name is Sara.”

“With or without an h?” she asked.

“Without,” I said, pleased with my psychic ability.

“Actually, it’s neither. My name is Susan. Susan McDermott. Without the h.”

“I’m Edgar Eagle Runner,” I said, though my driver’s license still read Edgar Joseph.

“Eagle Runner,” she repeated, feeling the shape of my name fill her mouth, then roll past her tongue, teeth, and lips.

“Susan,” I said.

“Eagle Runner,” she whispered. “What kind of Indian are you?”

“Spokane.”

“Never heard of it.”

“We’re a small tribe. Salmon people.”

“The salmon are disappearing,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they are.”

Susan McDermott and I were married in a small ceremony seven months later in St. Therese Catholic Church in Madrona, a gentrified neighborhood ten minutes from downtown Seattle. She’d been baptized at St. Therese as a toddler by a Jesuit who many years later went hiking on Mount Rainier and vanished. Father David or Joseph or Father Something Biblical. She didn’t remember anything about him, neither the color of his hair nor the exact shape of his theology, but she thought that his disappearance was a metaphor for her love life.

“One day, many years ago,” she said, “my heart walked into the snow and vanished. But then you found it and gave it heat.”

“Is that a simile or a metaphor?” I asked.

“It might be an analogy,” she said.

Our vows were witnessed by three dozen of Susan’s best friends, along with most of her coworkers at the architecture firm, but Susan’s handsome brother and parents stayed away as a protest against my pigmentation.

“I can understand fucking him,” her brother had said upon hearing the news of our engagement. “But why do you want to share a checking account?”

He was so practical.

Half of the partners and all of my fellow associates from the law firm showed up to watch me tie the knot.

Velma, my dark-skinned mother, was overjoyed by my choice of mate. She’d always wanted me to marry a white woman and beget half-breed children who would marry white people who would beget quarter-bloods, and so on and so on, until simple mathematics killed the Indian in us.

When asked, my mother told white people she was Spanish, not Mexican, not Hispanic, not Chicana, and certainly not Spokane Indian with a little bit of Aztec thrown in for spice, even though she was all of these things.

As for me, I’d told any number of white women that I was part Aztec and I’d told a few that I was completely Aztec. That gave me some mystery, some ethnic weight, a history of glorious color and mass executions. Strangely enough, there were aphrodisiacal benefits to claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals. In any event, pretending to be an Aztec warrior was a lot more impressive than revealing I was just some bright kid who’d fought his way off the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State and was now a corporate lawyer in Seattle who pretended to have a lot more money that he did.

I’d emptied my meager savings account to pay for the wedding and reception, refusing to allow Susan to help, though she made twice what I did. I was living paycheck to paycheck, a bizarre circumstance for a man whose monthly wage exceeded his mother’s yearly income as a social worker in the small city of Spokane, Washington.

My mother was an Indian woman who taught drunk white people not to drink, stoned whites not to smoke, and abusive whites not to throw the punch. A simple and honorable job. She was very good at it and I loved her. She wore a black dress to the wedding, nearly funeral wear, but brightened it with a salmon-colored scarf and matching shoes.

I counted seventeen white women at the wedding. On an average day, Susan would have been the fourth or fifth most attractive. On this, her wedding day, dressed in an ivory gown with plunging neckline, she was easily the most beautiful white woman in the chapel; she was more serene, sexy, and spiritual than the wooden Mary hanging on the west wall or the stained-glassed Mary filling up one of the windows.

Susan’s niece, an eighteen-year-old, served as her maid of honor. She modeled teen wear for Nordstrom’s. I tried not to stare at her. My best man was one of the partners in the law firm where I worked.

“Hey, Runner,” he had said just before the ceremony began. “I love you, man.”

I’d hugged him, feeling guilty. My friendship with him was strictly professional.

During the ceremony, he cried. I couldn’t believe it. I’m not one of those men who believe tears are a sign of weakness. On the contrary, I believe it’s entirely appropriate, even attractive, for a man to cry under certain circumstances, but my wedding was not tear-worthy. In fact, there was a decided lack of emotion during the ceremony, mostly due to the absence of Susan’s immediate family.

My mother was the only member of my family sitting in the pews, but that didn’t bother or surprise me. She was the only one I had invited.

The ceremony itself was short and simple, because Susan believed brevity was always more elegant, and more sexy, than excess. I agreed with her.

“I will,” she said.

“I will,” I said.

We did.

During the first two years of our marriage, we attended thirty-seven cocktail parties, eighteen weddings, one divorce, seven Christmas parties, two New Year’s Eve parties, three New Year’s Day parties, nine birthday parties — only one of them for a child under the age of eighteen — six opera performances, nine literary readings, twelve museum openings, one museum closing, three ballets, including a revival of Swan Lake in New York City, one spouse-swapping party we left before we took off our coats, and thirty-two films, including most of those nominated for Oscars and two or three that had screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

I attended business lunches Monday through Friday, and occasionally on Saturdays, while Susan kept her Friday lunches free so she could carry on an affair with an architect named Harry. She’d begun the affair a few days after our first anniversary and it had gone on for seven months before she’d voluntarily quit him, never having known that I’d known about the tryst, that I’d discovered his love letters hidden in a shoe box at the bottom of her walk-in closet.

I hadn’t been snooping on her when I’d found the letters and I didn’t bother to read any of them past the salutation that began each. “My love, my love, my love,” they’d read, three times, always three times, like a chant, like a prayer. Brokenhearted, betrayed, I’d kept the letters sacred by carefully placing them back, intact and unread, in the shoe box and sliding the box back into its hiding place.

I suppose I could have exacted revenge on her by sleeping with one or more of her friends or coworkers. I’d received any number of subtle offers to do such a thing, but I didn’t want to embarrass her. Personal pain should never be made public. Instead, in quiet retaliation, I patronized prostitutes whenever I traveled out of town. Miami, Los Angeles, Boston. Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston.

In San Francisco for a deposition hearing, I called the first service listed in the Yellow Pages.

“A-1 Escorts,” said the woman. A husky voice, somehow menacing. I’m sure her children hated the sound of it, even as I found myself aroused by its timbre.

“A-1 Escorts,” she said again when I did not speak.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi. Hello. Uh, I’m looking for some company this evening.”

“Where you at?”

“The Prescott.”

“Nice place.”

“Yeah, they have whirlpool bathtubs.”

“Water sports will cost you extra.”

“Oh, no, no, no. I’m, uh, rather traditional.”

“Okay, Mr. Traditional, what are you looking for?”

I’d slept with seventeen prostitutes, all of them blond and blue-eyed. Twelve of them had been busty while the other five had been small-breasted. Eight of them had claimed to be college students; one of them even had a chemistry textbook in her backpack.

“Do you employ any Indian women?” I asked.

“Indian? Like with the dot in the forehead?”

“No, no, that’s East Indian. From India. I’m looking for American Indian. You know, like Tonto.”

“We don’t have any boys.”

“Oh, no, I mean, I want an Indian woman.”

There was a long silence on the other end. Was she looking through some kind of catalogue? Searching her inventory for the perfect woman for me? Was she calling other escort companies, looking for a referral? I wanted to hang up the phone. I’d never had intercourse with an Indian woman.

“Yeah, we got somebody. She’s a pro.”

“What do you mean by pro?”

“She used to work pornos.”

“Pornos?”

“Dirty movies? X-rated? You got them right there on the pay-per-view in your room, buddy.”

“What’s her name?”

“She calls herself Tawny Feather.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I never kid.”

I wondered what kind of Indian woman would call herself Tawny Feather. Sexually speaking, Indian women and men are simultaneously promiscuous and modest. That’s a contradiction, but it also happens to be the truth. I just couldn’t imagine an Indian woman who would star in pornographic movies.

“Well, you want a date or not?” asked the husky-voiced woman.

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

“How much you want?”

“Two hundred.”

“Sold,” I said.

“What room?”

“1216.”

“Who should she ask for?”

“Geronimo.”

“Ha, ha,” she said and hung up the phone.

Less than an hour later, there was a knock on the door. I peered through the peephole and saw her.

Tawny Feather.

She wore a conservative tan suit and a string of fake pearls. Dream-catcher earrings, turquoise rings, a stainless-steel eagle pinned to her lapel. Good camouflage. Professional but eccentric. She looked like a woman on her way to or from a meeting. She looked like a woman with an Individualized Retirement Account.

She was also a white woman wearing a black wig over her short blond hair.

“You’re not Indian,” I said when I opened the door.

She looked me up and down.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “But you are.”

“Mostly.”

“Well,” she said as she stepped into the room and kissed my neck. “Then you can mostly pretend I’m Indian.”

She stayed all night, which cost me another five hundred dollars, and ordered eggs and toast for breakfast, which cost me another twenty.

“You’re the last one,” I said as she prepared to leave.

“The last what?”

“My last prostitute.”

“The last one today?” she asked. “Or the last one this month? What kind of time period are we talking about here?”

She swore she was an English major.

“The last one forever,” I said.

She smiled, convinced that I was lying and/or fooling myself, having heard these same words from any number of customers. She knew that she and her coworkers were drugs for men like me.

“Sure I am,” she said.

“No, really,” I said. “I promise.”

She laughed.

“Son,” she said, though she was ten years younger than me. “You don’t have to make me any damn promises.”

She took off her black wig and handed it to me.

“You keep it,” she said and gave me a free good-bye kiss.

Exactly three years after our wedding, Susan gave birth to our first child, a boy. He weighed eight pounds, seven ounces, and was twenty-two inches long. A big baby. His hair was black and his eyes were a strange gray. He died ten minutes after leaving Susan’s body.

After our child died, Susan and I quit having sex. Or rather, she stopped wanting to have sex. I just want to tell the whole story. For months I pressured, coerced, seduced, and emotionally blackmailed her into sleeping with me. At first, I assumed she’d been engaged in another affair with another architect named Harry, but my private detective found only evidence of her grief: crying jags in public rest rooms, aimless wandering in the children’s departments of Nordstrom’s and the Bon Marche, and visits to a therapist I’d never heard about.

She wasn’t touching anybody else but me. Our lives moved on.

After a year of reluctant sex, I believed her orgasms were mostly due to my refusal to quit touching her until she did come, the arduous culmination of my physical endeavors rather than the result of any emotional investment she might have had in fulfillment. And then, one night, while I was still inside her, moving my hips in rhythm with hers, I looked into her eyes, her blue eyes, and saw that her good eye held no more light in it than her dead eye. She wasn’t literally blind, of course. She’d just stopped seeing me. I was startled by the sudden epiphany that she’d been faking her orgasms all along, certainly since our child had died, and probably since the first time we’d made love.

“What?” she asked, a huge question to ask and answer at any time in our lives. Her hands never left their usual place at the small of my back.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, and I was sorry, and left her naked and alone in bed while I quickly dressed and went out for a drink.

I don’t drink alcohol, never have, mostly because I don’t want to maintain and confirm any of my ethnic stereotypes, let alone the most prevalent one, but also because my long-lost father, a half-breed, is still missing somewhere in the bottom of a tequila bottle. I had always wondered if he was a drunk because he was Indian or because he was white or because he was both.

Personally, I like bottled water, with gas, as the Europeans like to say. If I drink enough of that bubbly water in the right environment, I can get drunk. After a long night of Perrier or Pellegrino, I can still wake up with a vicious hangover. Obviously, I place entirely too much faith in the power of metaphor.

When I went out carousing with my fellow lawyers, I ended up in fancy hotel lounges, private clubs, and golf course cigar rooms, the places where the alcoholics adhere to a rigid dress code, but after leaving my marriage bed I wanted to drink in a place free from lawyers and their dress codes, from emotional obligations and beautiful white women, even the kind of white woman who might be the tenth most attractive in any room in the world.

I chose Chuck’s, a dive near the corner of Virginia and First.

I’d driven by the place any number of times, had seen the Indians who loitered outside. I assumed it was an Indian bar, one of those establishments where the clientele, through chance and design, is mostly indigenous. I’d heard about these kinds of places. They are supposed to exist in every city.

“What can I get you?” asked the bartender when I sat on the stool closest to the door. She was an Indian woman with scars on her face and knuckles. A fighter. She was a woman who had once been pretty but had grown up in a place where pretty was punished. Now, twenty pounds overweight, on her way to forty pounds more, she was most likely saving money for a complete move to a city yet to be determined.

“Hey, handsome,” she asked again as I stared blankly at her oft-broken nose. I decided that her face resembled most of the furniture in the bar: dark, stained by unknown insults, and in a continual state of repair. “What the fuck would you like to drink?”

“Water,” I said, surprised that the word “fuck” could sound so friendly.

“Water?”

“Yeah, water.”

She filled a glass from the tap behind her and plunked it down in front of me.

“A dollar,” she said.

“For tap water?”

“For space rental.”

I handed her a five-dollar bill.

“Keep the change,” I said and took a big drink.

“Cool. Next time, you get a clean glass,” she said and waited for my reaction.

I swallowed hard, kept my dinner down, and smiled.

“I don’t need to know what’s coming next,” I said. “I like mysteries.”

“What kind of mysteries?”

“Hard-boiled. The kind where the dog gets run over, the hero gets punched in the head, and the bad guy gets eaten by sharks.”

“Not me,” she said. “I got too much blood in my life already. I like romances.”

I wondered if she wanted to sleep with me.

“You want something else,” she said, “just shout it out. I’ll hear you.”

She moved to the other end of the bar where an old Indian man sipped at a cup of coffee. They talked and laughed. Surprisingly jealous of their camaraderie, I turned away and looked around the bar. It was a small place, maybe fifty feet long by twenty feet wide, with one pinball machine, one pool table, and two bathrooms. I supposed the place would be packed on a weekend.

As it was, on a cold Thursday, there were only five Indians in the bar, other than the bartender, her old friend, and me.

Two obese Indian women shared a table in the back, an Indian couple danced in front of a broken jukebox, and one large and muscular Indian guy played pool by himself. In his white T-shirt, blue-jean jacket, tight jeans, and cowboy boots, he looked like Chief Broom from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I decided he could have killed me with a flick of one finger.

He looked up from his pool cue when he felt my eyes on him.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” he asked. His eyes were darker than the eight ball. I had no idea that “fuck” could be such a dangerous word.

“Nothing,” I said.

Still holding his cue stick, he walked a few paces closer to me. I was afraid, very afraid.

“Nothing?” he asked. “Do I look like nothing to you?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I mean, I was just watching you play pool. That’s all.”

He stared at me, studied me like an owl might study a field mouse.

“You just keep your eyes to yourself,” he said and turned back to his game.

I thought I was safe. I looked down to the bartender, who was shaking her head at me.

“Because I just, I just want to know,” sputtered the big Indian. “I just want to know who the hell you think you are.”

Furious, he shouted, a primal sort of noise, as he threw the cue stick against the wall. He rushed at me and lifted me by the collar.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m nobody,” I said, wet with fear. “Nobody. Nobody.”

“Put him down, Junior,” said the bartender.

Junior and I both turned to look at her. She held a pistol down by her hip, not as a threat, but more like a promise. Junior studied the bartender’s face, estimated the level of her commitment, and dropped me back onto the stool.

He took a few steps back, pointed at me.

“I’m sick of little shits like you,” he said. “Fucking urban Indians in your fancy fucking clothes. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

I looked down and saw my denim jacket and polo shirt, the khakis and brown leather loafers. I looked like a Gap ad.

“I ever see you again,” Junior said. “I’m going to dislocate your hips.”

I flinched. Junior obviously had some working knowledge of human anatomy and the most effective means of creating pain therein. He saw my fear, examined its corners and edges, and decided it was large enough.

“Jesus,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you. What are you going to do? You fucking wimp. You’re not worth my time. Why don’t you get the fuck out of here? Why don’t you just get in your BMW, that’s what you drive, enit? Why don’t you get in your fucking BMW and get out of here before I change my mind, before I pop out one of your eyes with a fucking spoon, all right?”

I didn’t drive a BMW; I drove a Saab.

“Yeah, fuck you,” Junior said, thoroughly enjoying himself now. “Just drive back to your fucking mansion on Mercer Island or Edmonds or whatever white fucking neighborhood you live in. Drive back to your white wife. She’s white, enit? Yeah, blond and blue-eyed, I bet. White, white. I bet her pussy hair is blond, too. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

I wanted to hate him.

“Go back to your mansion and read some fucking Teletubbies to your white fucking kids.”

“What?” I asked.

“I said, go home to your white fucking kids.”

“Fuck you,” I said and completely surprised Junior. Good thing. He hesitated for a brief moment before he rushed at me again. His hesitation gave the bartender enough time to vault the bar and step in between Junior and me. I couldn’t believe how fast she was.

She pressed the pistol tightly against Junior’s forehead.

“Let it go, Junior,” said the bartender.

“Why are you protecting him?” Junior asked.

“I don’t give a shit about him,” she said. “But I do care about you. You get into trouble again and you’re going to jail forever. You know that.”

Junior smiled.

“Sissy,” he said to the bartender. “In another world, you and I are Romeo and Juliet.”

“But we live in this world, Junior.”

“Okay,” said Sissy. “This is what’s going to happen, Junior. You’re going to walk over behind the bar, get yourself another Diet Pepsi, and mellow out. And Mr. Tap Water here is going to walk out the front door and never return. How does that sound to the both of you?”

“Make it two Pepsis,” said Junior.

“Deal,” said Sissy. “How about you, Polo?”

“Fuck him,” I said.

Junior didn’t move anything except his mouth.

“Sissy,” he said. “How can you expect me to remain calm, how can you expect me to stay reasonable, when this guy so obviously wants to die?”

“I’ll fight you,” I said.

“What?” asked Sissy and Junior, both amazed.

“I’ll fight you,” I said again.

“All right, that’s what I want to hear,” said Junior. “Maybe you do have some balls. There’s an alley out back.”

“You don’t want to do this,” Sissy said to me.

“I’ll meet you out there, Junior,” I said.

Junior laughed and shook his head.

“Listen up, Tommy Hilfiger,” he said. “I’m not stupid. I go out the back door and you’re going to run out the front door. You don’t have to make things so complicated. You want to leave, I’ll let you leave. Just do it now, man.”

“He’s giving you a chance,” Sissy said to me. “You better take it.”

“No,” I said. “I want to fight. I’ll meet you out there. I promise.”

Junior studied my eyes.

“You don’t lie, do you?”

“I lie all the time,” I said. “Most of the time. But I’m not lying now. I want to fight.”

“All right, then, bring your best,” he said and walked out the back door.

“Are you out of your mind?” Sissy asked. “Have you ever been in a fight?”

“I boxed a little in college.”

“You boxed a little in college? You boxed a little in college? I can’t believe this. Do you have any idea who Junior is?”

“No, why should I?”

“He’s a pro.”

“What? You mean, like a professional boxer?”

“No, man. A professional street fighter. No judges, no ring, no rules. The loser is the guy who don’t get up.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Illegal? Illegal? What, you think you’re a lawyer now?”

“Actually, I am a lawyer.”

Sissy laughed until tears ran down her face.

“Sweetheart,” she said after she’d finally calmed down. “You need to leave. Please. Junior’s got a wicked temper but he’ll calm down soon enough. Hell, you come in a week from now and he’ll probably buy you some water.”

“Really?”

“No, not at all. I’m lying. You come in a week from now and Junior will break your thumbs.”

She laughed again, laughed until she had to lean against the bar for support.

“Stop it,” I said.

She kept laughing.

“Stop it,” I shouted.

She kept laughing.

“Sweetheart,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “I could kick your ass.”

I shrugged off my denim jacket and marched for the back door. Sissy tried to stop me, but I pulled away from her and stepped into the alley.

Junior was surprised to see me. I felt a strange sense of pride. Without another word, I rushed at Junior, swinging at him with a wide right hook, with dreams of connecting with his jaw and knocking him out with one punch.

Deep in the heart of the heart of every Indian man’s heart, he believes he is Crazy Horse.

My half-closed right hand whizzed over Junior’s head as he expertly ducked under my wild punch and then rose, surely and accurately, with a left uppercut that carried with it the moon and half of every star in the universe.

I woke up with my head in Sissy’s lap. She was washing my face with a cold towel.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“In the storeroom,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“Gone.”

My face hurt.

“Am I missing any teeth?”

“No,” said Sissy. “But your nose is broken.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me.”

I looked up at her. I decided she was still pretty and pretty was good enough. I grabbed her breast.

“Shit,” she said and shoved me away.

I sprawled on the floor while she scrambled to her feet.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “What is wrong with you?”

“What do you mean? What?”

“Did you think, did you somehow get it into your crazy head that I was going to fuck you back here? On the goddamn floor in the goddamn dirt?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Jesus Christ, you really thought I was going to fuck you, didn’t you?”

“Well, I mean, I just…”

“You just thought because I’m an ugly woman that I’d be easy.”

“You’re not ugly,” I said.

“Do you think I’m impressed by this fighting bullshit? Do you think it makes you some kind of warrior or something?”

She could read minds.

“You did, didn’t you? All of you Indian guys think you’re Crazy Horse.”

I struggled to my feet and walked over to the sink. I looked in the mirror and saw a bloody mess. I also noticed that one of my braids was missing.

“Junior cut it off,” said Sissy. “And took it with him. You’re lucky he liked you. Otherwise, he would have taken a toe. He’s done that before.”

I couldn’t imagine what that would have meant to my life.

“Look at you,” she said. “Do you think that’s attractive? Is that who you want to be?”

I carefully washed my face. My nose was most certainly broken.

“I just want to know, man. What are you doing here? Why’d you come here?”

My left eye was swelling shut. I wouldn’t be able to see out of it in the morning.

“I wanted to be with my people,” I said.

“Your people?” asked Sissy. “Your people? We’re not your people.”

“We’re Indians.”

“Yeah, we’re Indians. You, me, Junior. But we live in this world and you live in your world.”

“I don’t like my world.”

“You pathetic bastard,” she said, her eyes swelling with tears that had nothing to do with laughter. “You sorry, sorry piece of shit. Do you know how much I want to live in your world? Do you know how much Junior wants to live in your world?”

Of course I knew. For most of my life, I’d dreamed about the world where I currently resided.

“Junior and me,” she said. “We have to worry about having enough to eat. What do you have to worry about? That you’re lonely? That you have a mortgage? That your wife doesn’t love you? Fuck you, fuck you. I have to worry about having enough to eat.”

She stormed out of the room, leaving me alone.

I stood there in the dark for a long time. When I walked out, the bar was nearly empty. Another bartender was cleaning glasses. He didn’t look at me. Sissy was gone. The front door was wide open. I stepped into the street and saw her sitting at the bus stop.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

“Do you really want to do that?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Finally, you’re being honest.”

I stared at her. I wanted to say the exact right thing.

“Go home,” she said. “Just go home.”

I walked away, stopped halfway down the block.

“Do you have any kids?” I shouted back at her.

“Three,” she said.

Without changing my clothes, I crawled back into bed with Susan. Her skin was warm to the touch. The house ticked, ticked, ticked. In the morning, my pillow would be soaked with my blood.

“Where did you go?” Susan asked me.

“I was gone,” I said. “But now I’m back.”