The Toughest Indian in the World

SAINT JUNIOR

THAT WINTER, ON A full-moon Monday on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the first snow fell sometime between midnight and dawn, when most of the reservation residents — Indian and white alike — were asleep, except for the Cold Springs Singers, those six Spokane Indian men who sat at a drum on top of Lookout Mountain and sang the indigenous blues:

Way, ya, hey, yi, hey, yo.

On the road and on the street,

They’re just trying to keep the beat.

Way, ya, hey, ya, ya.

On the road and on the moon,

They’re just trying to keep the tune.

Way, ya, hey, yi, hey, yo.

Way, ya, hey, yi, hey, yo.

On the road and on the run,

Two little lovebirds having fun.

Will their love survive the test?

Romeo and Juliet.

Way, ya, hey, yi, hey, yo.

Wearing only T-shirts, blue jeans, and baseball caps, the Cold Springs Singers ignored howling winds and the impossibly white snow piling up on their shoulders. Three of the men wore their long black hair in careful braids, two wore crew cuts, and the last was chemotherapy bald. They’d all known one another since birth, since they’d spent their nine months in the wombs of six Indian mothers who’d sat together at their own drum — Big Mom’s Daughters — and sung their own songs. Those mothers had taught their sons public and private songs and the most secret difference between the two. To show their devotion and love, those sons had kept their mothers’ secrets safely hidden from the rest of the world.

From the age of three, those Indian boys sang and drummed together. Over the course of a twenty-year career, the Cold Springs Singers had traveled to one hundred different reservations and had fallen in love with three hundred and nineteen Indian women and sixteen Indian men. They’d fathered seven daughters and three sons. Three of them had married and two had divorced. They’d learned how to sing seven hundred and nine different songs:

Ha, ya, ha, ya, ha, ya.

Don’t tell me you love me

Unless you mean it.

Ha, ya, ha, ya, ha, ya.

Don’t tell me you love me

Unless you mean it.

Ha, ya, ha, ya, ha, ya.

I love you, I love you,

I want to marry you.

Ha, ya, ha, ya, ha, ya.

Marry me once, marry me twice

Marry me three times.

Ha, ya, ha, ya, ha, ya.

But now, as they sang on top of Lookout Mountain, the Cold Springs Singers were in love with the drum and only the drum. They’d forgotten what it meant to love anything other than the feel of stick in hand and song in throat. Of course, the Cold Springs Singers were ghosts, having all been killed when their blue van collided with a logging truck on the S-curves of Little Falls Road, just a few feet away from the natural spring that provided the namesake for the group, but those Indian boys still sang and pounded the sticks better than any other drum alive or dead:

Hey, ya, hey, ya, ho, ya, ho.

I don’t have any money, honey.

I don’t have a nice car.

Hey, ya, hey, ya, ho, ya, ho.

I don’t have a big house, mouse.

I don’t have a fast car.

Hey, ya, hey, ya, ho, ya, ho.

I don’t have fancy shoes, Lou.

I don’t have a new car.

Hey, ya, hey, ya, ho, ya, ho.

Will you still love me?

Will you still love me?

Will you still love me

When I’m old and broke?

Hey, ya, hey, ya, ho, ya, ho.

All night, they sang indigenous songs called “49s,” though there’s not an Indian alive who remembers exactly why they’re called 49s. Some say those songs were invented after fifty Indian warriors went out to battle and only one came back alive. Distraught, the lone survivor mourned his friends by singing forty-nine songs, one for each of the dead. Others believe the 49s were invented when fifty warriors went out to battle and forty-nine came back alive. Distraught, they remembered the lost one by singing forty-nine songs, one by each of the living. Still others believe the 49s were invented by a woman who fell in love with forty-nine men and had her heart broken by each and every one of them. And still more believe the 49s were invented by forty-nine men who mourned the loss of one good woman. However they were invented, those songs have always been heavy with sadness and magic. However they were invented, the Cold Springs Singers knew all of the words and vocables, all the 4/4 signatures and atonal cries in the night.

On the Spokane Indian Reservation, with the coming of that first snow, the Cold Springs Singers sang 49s until every Indian was startled awake and sang along. They all sang because they understood what it meant to be Indian and dead and alive and still bright with faith and hope:

Basketball, basketball.

Way, ya, hi, yo, way, ya, hi, yo.

Give me the ball, give me the ball.

Way, ya, hi, yo, way, ya, hi, yo.

And let me shoot, and let me shoot.

Way, ya, hi, yo, way, ya, hi, yo.

And win the game, and win the game.

Way, ya, hi, yo, way, ya, hi, yo.

And then she’ll love me, then she’ll love me.

Way, ya, hi, yo, way, ya, hi, yo.

Forever and ever, forever and ever.

First snow was a good time for most Indians, even the ghosts, and especially the Indians and ghosts of Indians who possessed a good sense of rhythm and irony. After all, it took a special kind of courage for an Indian to look out a window into the deep snow and see anything special in that vast whiteness.

On that night, in that reservation whiteness, the falsetto voices of the Cold Springs Singers drifted down from their mountain onto an outdoor basketball court covered with two feet of new snow. On that court, a Spokane Indian named Roman Gabriel Fury ran fast breaks with the ghosts of his mother and father, seven cousins, nine dead dogs, and his maternal and paternal grandparents. He was the best basketball player his reservation had ever known, though he was older now and no longer a magician. He was the only Fury left alive in the world, but he was not alone. He had his basketball, his ghosts, and an Indian woman named Grace Atwater asleep at home.

Roman Gabriel Fury lived with Grace Atwater in a shotgun shack set down like a lighthouse in a small field about five miles north of Wellpinit, the only town on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Outside the shack, a mammoth satellite dish rose from the snow like the gray sail of a landlocked ship. Of course, unlike most others, that metal sail was covered with reservation bumper stickers and tribal graffiti:

Custer had it coming!

Proud to be a Spokane Indian

E = MC²

Fry bread power!

American Indians for Nixon

Roman had no idea who’d plastered the Nixon sticker on his dish — Indians were capable of the most self-destructive behavior — but Roman had never removed it because he believed wholeheartedly in free expression. Roman’s entire political philosophy revolved around the basic tenet that a person, any person, had only enough energy at any given time to believe in three things.

“Choose your three,” Roman was often fond of pontificating. “And stick with them.”

Roman himself believed in free expression, Grace Atwater, and basketball. Neither a Republican nor a Democrat, Roman had always voted for the candidate who looked like he or she could hit a twenty-foot jump shot with three seconds left on the clock and the home team down by one. Therefore, he was very excited that Bill Bradley, former Princeton All-American and New York Knick, was running for President of the United States.

“Finally, a worthy candidate,” Roman had said during Bradley’s first press conference.

“Come on,” Grace had said. “You can’t vote for a guy with a jump shot that ugly. And besides, you grew up in a matriarchy. You should vote for a woman.”

“If there’s a woman out there with a jump shot,” Roman had replied, “who believes in the socialization of medicine and education, then I will not only vote for her, but I will also devote my life to her administration.”

“Well, then, I guess that means I’m running for president,” she’d said.

“Now, wouldn’t that surprise the hell out of them? I expect to see your announcement on television soon.”

“I will begin my press conference by announcing that yes, I have smoked pot, and yes, I have had sex, lots of sex. In fact, I will introduce the seven men and one woman I have slept with and let them answer all the questions regarding my campaign and political philosophies.”

“You will be a hero to all women and men.”

“That’s the power of television.”

Roman had bought the satellite dish, spending most of the money he’d won by hitting a trifecta at Playfair Race Track in Spokane, because he’d wanted to enrich his life by partaking in the free expression of sitcom writers and shopping-channel salespeople, and because he wanted to provide Grace with a source of entertainment, education, and dozens of episodes of Bonanza, featuring the talents of her favorite actor, Dan “Hoss” Blocker, and because he wanted to watch every single college and professional basketball game ever played.

Though he rarely played seriously anymore, preferring to shoot baskets all by himself, he still loved the game and all of its details. For Roman, the beauty of a perfect pick-and-roll by the Utah Jazz’s John Stockton and Karl Malone was matched only by the beauty of a perfect pick-and-roll by John and Michelle Sirois, the best brother and sister nine-year-old hoopsters on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Roman knew that basketball was the most democratic sport. All you needed to play was something that resembled a ball and something else that approximated the shape of a basket.

These days, Roman himself resembled a basketball and hoop. But he didn’t mind so much. Half of the Indians on the rez were fat and they all got laid by skinny and fat people alike. Standards of beauty were much more egalitarian on the rez, and Roman was an egalitarian man.

On the morning after the first snow, Roman slept on the couch in the living room. Across the room, a twelve-inch black-and-white television was balanced on top of a twenty-seven-inch color television. The small television had a great picture but no sound, while the large one had great sound and terrible reception. Roman called his televisions the Lone Ranger and Tonto, though he never told anybody which television was which. That morning, as the first snow drifted against the door, both televisions replayed a classic press conference from a few years earlier:

Michael Jordan, wearing a custom-tailored

Armani suit, stands at a podium in some beautiful hotel in downtown Chicago. His ebony skin reflects dozens of flashbulbs. He leans close to the porcupine of microphones rising from the podium. He smiles. Yesterday, he was playing minor league baseball, swinging at and missing curve balls by at least two feet. Today, the room is as silent as a Catholic Church on a Tuesday afternoon in July. Jordan licks his lips, takes a breath, drawing out the moment, ever the showman, ever the competitor, and says, “I’m back.”

Still asleep on the couch, holding a basketball like a lover in his arms, Roman was wrapped up like a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound butterfly in a Pendleton-blanket cocoon. He wore a huge white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. He heard those words. He heard “I’m back,” and he stirred in his sleep.

I’m back.

Still holding the basketball, Roman sat up with a bolt and stared at the television. For just a brief moment, he wondered if Jordan was coming back for the second time but then Roman came to his senses.

I’m back.

Roman remembered when Michael Jordan had announced he was returning to basketball. There had been joy, pure unadulterated joy, in Jordan’s voice, in stark contrast to the grief and pain when he’d announced his retirement just a few short days after his father had been murdered by two teenage thugs. Roman recalled that one of those killers was a Lumbee Indian, a disturbing fact. But then again, it was Indian scouts who had helped white people kill Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and every other Indian warrior in the world.

I’m back.

After he’d returned to the NBA, Jordan had promptly led his Chicago Bulls to three more championships, the last coming on the final jump shot of Jordan’s career, before he’d retired again and left Roman no options other than to take up coaching grade-school basketball at the Spokane Indian Tribal School.

I’m back.

Sitting in front of his two televisions, holding the basketball in one hand, Roman ran his other hand through his greasy black hair, always too thick to properly braid, and then swallowed the last drink out of a two-liter Diet Pepsi bottle sitting on the coffee table.

Roman was forty years old and forty pounds overweight. He pulled his thick, heavy body from the couch and shuffled from the living room into the bathroom. He tugged his underwear down to his ankles and sat on the toilet for a long morning piss. He’d always been a gentleman and knew that a stand-up piss made a terrible mess, no matter the accuracy of the shooter.

Roman Gabriel Fury was named after an obscure professional football quarterback named Roman Gabriel — a man with his own kind of fury and the rumor of Indian blood — who’d toiled for the Los Angeles Rams in the early seventies. Young Roman had never seen the elder Roman play, not in person, not on television, though one photograph of the dark-haired quarterback had been framed and nailed to the wall above the Fury fireplace.

“Was he your favorite player?” young Roman had once asked his father, Edgar Fury, in an effort to understand why he’d chosen such an ornate moniker for his only child.

“No,” Edgar had said. “Just liked the name.”

“I don’t like it much.”

“Well, just be glad your name ain’t Namath Fury. Or Tarkenton Fury, for that matter. I could have named you after some old white boy quarterback.”

Partly because of his name and partly because of his own stubborn nature, Roman Fury had never played football. Instead, he’d played basketball until his palms bled, and read books, hundreds of books, thereby saving himself from a lifetime of reservation poverty.

Oh, to this day, he still loved the reservation — he lived there, after all — but there was a time when he’d wanted to travel, when he’d known that he belonged elsewhere. From the very beginning of his life, he’d dreamed of leaving, not because he needed to escape — though his journey certainly could have been viewed as a form of flight — but because he’d always known that his true and real mission lay somewhere outside the boundaries of the reservation. There were Indians who belonged on the reservation and there were Indians who belonged in the city, and then there were those rare few who could live successfully in either place. But Roman had always felt like he didn’t belong anywhere, like he couldn’t belong to any one place or any series of places. Though his tribe had never been nomadic, he’d been born with the need to visit cities — every city! — where no Spokane Indian had ever been before.

He’d shaken hands with two different Popes, waded in the Mediterranean Sea, and walked one hundred miles atop the Great Wall of China. After a solid and unspectacular college basketball career — his name had never been mentioned on ESPN’s SportsCenter—he’d played professionally in Norway, Italy, Japan, Des Moines, Russia, Hartford, Yugoslavia, Greece, Australia, Kamloops, British Columbia, Germany, France, Kalamazoo, and every other Spanish-speaking country in South America.

No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

Every autumn for ten years, Roman had attended NBA training camps — mostly for Eastern Conference teams because he had a great jump shot and slow feet — but he’d never even played in one exhibition game, let alone a regular-season contest, a feat that would have made him the first federally recognized Indian since Jim Thorpe to play professional basketball. But it had never happened, no matter how well he’d played in training camps. He’d been cut from fifteen different NBA teams in those ten years, and had always ended up as the second-best American player on third-rate international teams.

Then, one morning, after a particularly horrid game where he’d missed fifteen straight shots and turned the ball over seven times, he’d woken up in a Hilton Hotel in Madrid, Spain, with the sure knowledge that it was time to quit basketball for good and return to the reservation.

On the morning after the first snow, Grace Atwater could hear the television playing out in the living room, could hear the replay of Michael Jordan’s famous press conference.

I’m back.

Grace knew that her husband had fallen asleep out there again. He often fell asleep on the couch, leaving her alone in the bed. She didn’t mind. He snored loudly and usually stole the covers. She smiled at the thought of her sloppy husband. He’d once been thin and beautiful.

She was a Mohawk Indian from the island of Manhattan — her father had been an iron worker who’d help build most of the New York skyline — but she’d lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation for so many years, and had spent so much time with the Spokanes, that she’d realized she was more Spokane than anything else. She’d always understood that an Indian could be assimilated and disappear into white culture, but she’d discovered, too, that an Indian of one tribe could be swallowed whole by another tribe. She was Jonah; the Spokanes were the stomach, ribs, and teeth of the whale.

I’m back.

She taught fourth grade at the Spokane Tribal School, and loved her job, though it had convinced her never to have her own children. Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn’t see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That’s what mothers told her: Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing; it’s spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true — it must be true — but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She’d known too many women who’d vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who’d magically been replaced by their children and their children’s desires. But what about the maternal instinct? Well, for eight hours a day, over the last eight years, within the four walls of a fourth-grade classroom, she’d loved one hundred and thirty-six Spokane Indian boys and girls, had loved them well and kept them safe, and had often been the only adult in their lives who’d never actively or inactively broken their hearts. How many nights had one of her former students shown up at her house and asked to be sheltered?

Still, Grace had never thought of herself as any kind of saint. More likely, she was just a good teacher; nothing wrong with that, but nothing uncommon or special about it either. She’d often wondered if she was doing everything she could to ensure the survival of the Spokanes, the Mohawks, of all Indian people. Maybe she should have given birth to a dozen indestructible Indian children, part-Mohawk, part-Spokane, and part-Kevlar. Most of her fellow Mohawks, and most members of every other tribe, were marrying white partners and conceiving fragile children. Grace knew how fractions worked; Indians were disappearing by halves. But then again, she was only half-Mohawk herself and lived three thousand miles away from her people. Her people — what an arrogant concept! They didn’t belong to her and she didn’t belong to them. She was friendly with only twenty other Mohawks, having learned long ago that she preferred the company of these Spokanes, as bitter and sarcastic as they could be. Hell, these Spokanes started fistfighting one another in first grade and only stopped punching and kicking with the arrivals of their first Social Security checks. Then those former brawlers suddenly became respected elders and clucked their tongues at the young and violent. She was convinced the Spokanes survived out of spite. After a nuclear war, the only things left standing would be Spokane Indians, cockroaches, farmers, and Michael Jordan.

I’m back.

Inside their small house, Grace listened as Roman stood from the couch and walked into the bathroom. He sat down to piss. She thought that Roman’s sit-down pisses were one of the most romantic and caring things that any man had ever done for any woman.

After the piss, Roman pulled up his underwear, climbed into a pair of sweatpants hanging from the shower rod, slipped his feet into Chuck Taylor basketball shoes, and stepped into the bedroom.

Grace pretended to be asleep in their big bed, warm and safe beneath seven generations of sheets, blankets, and quilts. She was a big woman with wide hips, thick legs, large breasts, and a soft stomach. She was deep brown and beautiful.

Still holding the basketball, Roman leaned close to Grace, his face just inches away from hers.

“There’s a strange woman in my bed,” said Roman.

“I know,” said Grace, without opening her eyes.

“What should I do about her?”

“Let her sleep.”

Roman touched the basketball to Grace’s cheek.

“Michael Jordan is coming back again,” he said.

“You can’t fool me,” said Grace. “I heard it. That was just a replay.”

“Yeah, but I wish he was coming back again. He should always come back.”

“Don’t let it give you any crazy ideas.”

Roman pulled the basketball away and leaned even closer to Grace. His lips were brushing against her ear.

“It snowed last night,” he whispered.

“I can smell it,” said Grace.

“What do you want for breakfast?”

“Make me some of your grandma’s salmon mush.”

Roman made the mush in the way he’d been taught to make it. Then he brought the mush, along with two slices of toast, a cup of coffee, and the morning newspaper, to Grace and watched her eat breakfast in bed.

Up until her death, Grandmother Fury had been the very last Spokane Indian who knew how to make salmon mush in the way that Spokane Indians had been making salmon mush for the last hundred years or so. In terms of the entire tribal history, salmon mush was a recent addition to the traditional cuisine — just as human beings were among the most recent life-forms on the whole planet — but salmon mush was a singular and vitally important addition. After all, Grandmother Fury’s own grandmother had served salmon mush to Chief Joseph just a few days before he led the Nez Perce on their heroic and ultimately failed thousand-mile flight from the Ninth Cavalry. Though he was captured and sent to the prison of some other tribe’s reservation, Joseph praised the salmon mush he’d eaten and often hinted that the strange combination of fish, oats, and milk was the primary reason why he’d nearly led his people into the wild freedom of Canada.

Nine decades later, on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Grandmother Fury said a prayer for Joseph and stirred a few more slices of smoked salmon into the pot of oats boiling on her woodstove. At that point, many cooks would have poured in the milk and brought it all back to the boil. But Grandmother Fury was cousin to salmon and knew their secrets. She poured the ice-cold milk over the boiling salmon and oats just a few seconds before serving. In that collision between heat and cold, between mammal and fish, between liquid and solid, there was so much magic that Grandmother Fury trembled as she set a bowl in front of her grandson and watched him eat.

“It’s good,” said Roman. He was eighteen years old and lovely in his grandmother’s eyes.

“But you haven’t even tasted it,” she said, in Spokane, the tribal language.

“Don’t have to,” said Roman in English. “I believe in your mush more than I believe in God.”

“You liar,” she said in Spokane and laughed.

“Yes,” he said in English. “But it’s a good lie.”

Grandmother and grandson sat in the small kitchen of her home — their home! — and found no need to speak to each other. Because they were Indians, they gave each other room to think, to invent the next lie, joke, story, compliment, or insult. He ate; she watched.

That afternoon, Roman was going to take the Colonial Aptitude Test, his college boards, and hoped to score high enough to get into college, any college. He was the first member of his extended family who’d even wanted to pursue higher education. In fact, there were only a couple of dozen Spokane Indians who’d ever graduated from any four-year university and only a few more than that who’d bothered to attend even the smallest community college.

A few small colleges had offered full basketball scholarships to Roman, but he’d turned them down. He wanted to attend the best school possible, whether he played basketball for them or not.

“You know,” Grandmother Fury said in rough English, in careful and clumsy syllables, after Roman had finished one bowl of mush and started in on another. “Those college tests, they’re not for Indians.”

Roman nodded his head. He knew the Colonial Aptitude Test was culturally biased, but he also knew the CAT was supposed to be culturally biased. The CAT was designed to exclude from college as many poor people as statistically possible. Despite the rumors of democracy and fairness, Roman knew, when it came to the CAT, that meritocracy was to college as fish was to bicycle. He knew the CAT was an act of war. As a result, Roman wasn’t approaching the test with intellect and imagination. He was going to attack it with all of the hatred and anger in his heart.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” she said in Spokane.

“I don’t want to be afraid.”

“Yes, I know,” she said in English.

With tears in his eyes and a salty taste at the back of his throat, Roman finished another bowl of salmon mush and asked for another.

“Yes,” said his grandmother. She said, “Yes.”

Three months later, Roman Gabriel Fury sat in the waiting room of the Colonial Aptitude Testing Service office in Spokane, Washington. He held two letters in his hands. One letter congratulated him on his exceptional CAT performance. The other letter requested his presence for a special meeting with the president of the Colonial Aptitude Testing Service.

Nervous and proud, Roman wondered if he was going to be given a special commendation, a reward for such a high score, unusually high for anybody, let alone an Indian boy who’d attended a reservation high school without chemistry, geometry, or foreign-language classes.

Sitting in the CAT office, in that small city named after his tribe, Roman wore his best suit, his only suit, a JCPenney special that his father had purchased for him four years earlier. Roman’s father was a poor and generous man who had given his son many things over the years, mostly inexpensive trinkets whose only value was emotional, but the JCPenney suit was expensive, perhaps the most expensive gift that Roman had ever received, certainly more valuable than being named after a professional quarterback who had some Indian blood, or the rumor of Indian blood. Young Roman had often wished his father had given him the name of the other professional Indian quarterback, Sonny Six Killer, the one who had demonstrable Indian blood. Roman Gabriel Fury often wished that his name was Sonny Six Killer Fury. With a name like that, Roman knew that he could have become a warrior.

“Mr. Furry,” said the CAT secretary, mispronouncing his name for the third time, adding an extra r that changed Roman from an angry Indian into a cute rodent. She sat behind a small desk. She’d worked for CAT for ten years. She’d never taken any of their tests.

Roman sat in silence. He hated wooden chairs.

“Mr. Furry,” she said.

“I’m not a hamster,” said Roman.

“Excuse me?”

“My name is not Furry. It’s not Hairy or Hirsute either. My name is Fury, as in righteous anger.”

“You don’t have to be so impolite.”

“You don’t have to mispronounce my name.”

“Well, Mr. Fury,” she said, feeling somehow smaller in the presence of a boy who was twenty years younger. “You can go in now. Mr. Williams will see you.”

“Assuming that he has eyes, I’m sure that’s an anatomical possibility.”

Roman stepped into another office and sat in another wooden chair across a large oak desk from Mr. Williams, a white man who studied, or pretended to study, the contents of a file folder.

“Hmmm,” said Mr. Williams, as if the guttural were an important part of his vocabulary.

“Yes,” said Roman, because he wanted to be the first one to use a word actually found in Webster’s Dictionary, Ninth Edition.

“Well,” said Mr. Williams. “Let me see here. It says here in your file that you’re eighteen years old, a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, valedictorian of Wellpinit High School on said reservation, captain of the chess, math, history, and basketball teams, accepted on full academic scholarship to St. Jerome the Second University here in Spokane.”

“Yes,” said Roman, with the same inflection as before.

“That’s quite the all-American résumé, Mr. Fury.”

“No, I think it’s more of an all-Native American résumé.”

Mr. Williams smiled. His teeth, skin, and pinstriped suit were all the same shade of gray. Roman couldn’t tell where the three-season wool ended and where the man began.

“Roman Gabriel Fury,” said Williams. “Quite an interesting name.”

“Normally, I’d say thank you, sir, but I don’t think that was a sincere compliment, was it?”

“Just an observation, young Mr. Fury. I am very good with observation. In fact, at this very moment, I am observing the fact that your parents are absent. A very distressing observation, to be sure, considering our specific request that your mother and father attend this meeting with you.”

“Sir, my parents are dead. If you’d read my file in its entirety, you might have observed that.”

Mr. Williams’s eyes flashed with anger, the first display of any color. He flipped through the file, searching for the two words that would confirm the truth: deceased, deceased.

At that moment, if Roman had closed his eyes, he could have seen the yellow headlights of the red truck that smashed head-on into his father’s blue Chevy out on Reservation Road. He could have remembered that his father was buried in a brown suit. At that moment, if Roman had closed his eyes, he could have seen his mother’s red blood coughed into the folds of a white handkerchief. Roman was three years old when his mother was buried in a purple dress. He barely remembered her.

“Yes,” said Mr. Williams. “I see now. Your grandmother has been your guardian for the last three years. Why didn’t she come?”

“She doesn’t speak much English, sir.”

“And yet, you speak English so well, speak it well enough to score in the ninety-ninth percentile in the verbal section of our little test. Quite an amazing feat for someone from, well, let’s call it a modest background.”

“I’ve never been accused of modesty.”

“No, I would guess not,” said Williams, setting the file down on his desk. He picked up a Mont Blanc pen as if it were a weapon.

“But I guess you’ve been called arrogant,” added Williams. “And, perhaps, calculating?”

“Calculating enough for a ninety-nine on the math section of your little test,” Roman said. He really hated wooden chairs.

“Yes, indeed,” said Williams. “A nearly perfect score. In fact, the second-highest score ever for a Native American. Congratulations.”

“Normally, I’d say thank you, sir, but I don’t think that was a sincere compliment, was it?”

Mr. Williams leaned across his desk, straightened his back, placed his hands flat on either side of his desk, took a deep breath, exhaled, and made himself larger. He owned all ten volumes of Harris Brubaker’s How to Use Body Language to Destroy Your Enemies.

“Son,” said Williams, using what Brubaker considered to be the second-most effective diminutive. “We’ve been informed there were certain irregularities in your test-taking process.”

“Could you be more specific, sir?”

“You were twenty minutes late for the test.”

“Yes, I was.”

“I also understand that your test-taking apparel was, to say the least, quite distracting.”

Roman smiled. He’d worn his red, yellow, white, and blue grass-dance outfit while taking the test — highly unusual, to say the least — but he had used two standard number-two pencils, as specified in the rule book.

“There’s nothing in the rule book about a dress code,” said Roman.

“No, no, there’s not. But I certainly would enjoy an explanation.”

“My grandmother told me your little test was culturally biased,” said Roman. “And that I might need a little extra power to do my best. I was going to bring my favorite drum group and let them sing a few honor songs, but I thought the non-Indians in the room might get a little, as you say, distracted.”

“Power?” asked Williams, using Harris Brubaker’s favorite word.

Roman stood and leaned across the desk. He’d read Brubaker’s first volume, had found it derivative and ambiguous, and never bothered to read any of the others.

“Well, you see, sir,” said Roman. “The thing is, I was exhausted from having to walk seventy-five miles to get from my reservation to Spokane for the test, because my grandmother and I are too poor to afford a dependable car.”

“You hitchhiked?” asked Williams.

“Oh, no, hitchhiking would mean that I actually got a ride. But people don’t pick up Indians much, you know?”

“Do you expect me to believe you walked seventy-five miles?”

“Well, that’s the way it is,” said Roman. “Anyway, I get to the city, but then I have to run thirty blocks to get to the private high school where they’re giving the test, because I had enough money for lunch or a bus, but not both, and sometimes you have to make hard choices.

“And then, once I got to the private high school, I had to convince the security guard, who looked suspiciously like a member of the Seventh Cavalry, that I was there to take the test, and not to vandalize the place. And hey, thank God I wasn’t wearing my grass-dance outfit yet because he might have shot me down on the spot.

“Anyway, once I got past him, I was, as you observed, twenty minutes late. So I ran into a bathroom, changed into my grass-dance outfit, then sat down with your little test, realizing belatedly that I was definitely the only Injun in the room, and aside from the black kid in the front row and the ambiguously ethnic chick in the back, the only so-called minority in the room, and that frightened me more than you will ever know.

“But I crack open the test anyway, and launch into some three-dimensional calculus problem, which is written in French translated from the Latin translated from the Phoenician or some other Godawful language that only white people seem to find relevant or useful, and I’m thinking, I am Crazy Horse, I am Geronimo, I am Sitting Bull, and I’m thinking the required number-two pencil is a bow and arrow, that every math question is Columbus, that every essay question is Custer, and I’m going to kill them dead.

“So, anyway, I’m sure I flunk the damn test, because I’m an Indian from the reservation, and I can’t be that smart, right? I mean, I’m the first person in my family to ever graduate from high school, so who the hell do I think I am, trying to go to college, right? So, I take the test and I did kill it. I killed it, I killed it, I killed it.

“And now, you want to take it away from me, a poor, disadvantaged, orphan minority who only wants to go to the best college possible and receive an excellent Catholic, liberal arts education, improve his life, and provide for his elderly, diabetic grandmother who has heroically taken care of him in Third World conditions.

“And, now, after all that, you want to take my score away from me? You want to change the rules after I learned them and beat them? Is that what you really want to do?”

Mr. Williams smiled, but none of his teeth showed.

“I didn’t think so,” said Roman as he turned away from the desk. He stepped through one door, walked past a woman who’d decided to hate him, and then ran.

As a high school senior, Grace Atwater had also been accepted into St. Jerome the Second University, not because of her grades, which were only average, but because she’d obtained those average grades at the Pierpoint School, one of the most exclusive private high schools in the country. Grace was the only Native American to ever attend Pierpoint, but she’d always known her Indian blood had nothing to do with her admittance. Her mother, Ge Kuo, the Chinese-American daughter of parents who’d never left China, had been the music teacher for twenty-three years. Still, to her credit, Grace had worked hard, fought her way past an undiagnosed case of dyslexia, and surprised everybody with a perfect score on the CAT — the highest score ever for a Native American. She’d also submitted a personal essay that had surprised the St. Jerome admissions board.

To Whom It May Concern, began Grace’s essay. This is the invocation I want to hear if I am accepted into your wonderful institution:

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to St. Jerome the Second University, or as we affectionately call it, Saint Junior.

You are a very special group of students. In fact, the very best this great country has to offer. This year’s incoming freshman class has an average high school grade point average of 3.81.

You have an average CAT score of 1280. Among you are forty-two American Merit Scholars.

One hundred and ten of you were president of your senior class. Seventy-five of you were president of your student body.

One hundred and sixty-two of you won varsity letters in various athletic endeavors. Sixty-three of you have received full athletic scholarships and will compete for St. Junior’s in basketball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, and track.

You have excelled. You have triumphed. You have worked hard and been rewarded for your exemplary efforts. You have been admitted to one of the finest institutions of higher education in the world. Please, give yourself a hand.

Good, good. Now I want you to hold out your right hand, palm up.

Now, I want you to think hard about all that you have accomplished so far in your young lives. I want you to think about all the trophies on your mantels and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the news clippings in your scrapbooks and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the letters on your jackets and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all of your accolades and rewards and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. Can you see them? Can you imagine them? Can you feel them?

Good, good. Now, I want you to crush all of that in your fist. I want you to grind it into dust and throw all of it away.

Because none of it means anything now. Today is your new birthday. Your new beginning. And I am here to tell you that twenty-five percent of you will not make it through your freshman year. I am here to tell you that more than forty percent of you will not graduate from this university. I am here to tell you that all of you will engage in some form of illicit activity or another. In premarital sex, in drug and alcohol abuse, in academic dishonesty and plagiarism. And you will tell lies. To yourselves, to each other, to your professors, to your confessors, to me. Most of you will fall in love and all of you will not be loved enough. And through all the pain and loneliness, through all the late hours and early mornings, you will learn.

Yes, you will grow from the frightened and confused teenagers you are now into the slightly less frightened and slightly less confused adults you will become.

I am Father Arnold, President of St. Jerome the Second University. May God bless you in all of your various journeys.

Three weeks before Grace left for St. Jerome, her mother died of breast cancer. Grace had never known her father — he’d fallen off a building and was buried in the foundation of the Rockefeller National Bank Building. When she was sixteen, Grace had opened up a savings account there and, without fail, had deposited one hundred dollars a month.

After they’d graduated together from St. Junior, Grace and Roman were married in a quick Reno, Nevada, ceremony and then flew to Greenland where Roman played shooting guard for a horrible team called the Whales. They won two and lost thirty-five that first season, despite Roman’s twenty points and ten assists a game. The next year, the Whales won their first five games before the entire league went bankrupt. Grace and Roman then moved on to twelve other countries and nineteen other basketball teams in ten years before she’d woken up one bright morning in a Hilton Hotel in Madrid, Spain, with the sure knowledge that she wanted to return to the United States.

“Roman, are you awake?”

“I think it’s time for us to go home.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve done all you can do over here.”

She’d supported him, emotionally and spiritually, had traveled with him to more places than she cared to remember. She’d eaten great food and had been food-poisoned six different times — she couldn’t look at a mushroom without retching — and she was reasonably fluent in five different languages. How many Indians could say that? She’d watched every minute of every one of his games — only God knows how many — and had held him equally tight after good and bad performances.

She had never loved him because he was a basketball player. In fact, she’d loved him despite the fact that he was a basketball player. She’d always understood that his need to prove and test his masculinity was some genetic throwback. Given the choice, he’d rather have been a buffalo hunter and soldier killer than the point guard for the Lakers, but there was no such choice, of course. He couldn’t be an indigenous warrior or a Los Angeles Laker. He was an Indian man who’d invented a new tradition for himself, a manhood ceremony that had usually provided him with equal amounts of joy and pain, but his ceremony had slowly and surely become archaic. Though she’d never tell him such a thing, she’d suspected his ceremony might have been archaic from the beginning. After all, the root word for warrior was war, and he’d always been a peaceful and kind man, a man who’d refused to join anybody’s army, most especially if they were fighting and killing for something he believed in.

“You have lost the moment you pick up a gun,” he’d always said. “When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”

Lying together in that Madrid Hilton Hotel, with its tiny European bathroom and scratchy sheets, she’d realized how much she loved her idealistic and pompous husband.

“Let’s go home,” she’d said to him again.

“Why?” he’d asked.

“Because I want to,” she’d said to him again as he stood naked from the bed and walked across the thin carpet.

No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

All during that time, during his domestic and foreign basketball career, she’d been writing stories, poems, essays, and the first few chapters of various failed novels. She’d never told Roman about her writing because she’d wanted to keep something for herself; she’d wanted to enjoy a secret, perhaps sacred, endeavor, and writing seemed to be her best vocation and avocation. Under various pseudonyms, she’d published work in dozens of the various university literary journals back in the United States, though she’d never bothered to read any of her writing after it had been published. She didn’t even bother to keep originals, preferring to start all over with the first word of each new poem, story, or essay.

“Let’s go home,” she’d said to him as he stood at the window of the Madrid Hilton. He was naked and thin and would never be that lovely again.

“I’m afraid,” he’d said.

“Of what?”

“I’m afraid I won’t know how to do anything else.”

There, in Spain, he’d stood naked in the window and wept.

No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

“What if basketball is all I will ever be good at?”

“Hey,” she’d said. “You’re not even that good a basketball player.”

“Ouch,” he’d said and laughed. They’d laughed together, though both of them had a secret. His: he’d hated her, ever so briefly, for telling the truth about his failed dreams. Hers: she’d hated herself, ever so briefly, for devoting her life to his dreams.

Both of them had locked their secrets in dark boxes, never to be opened, and caught the next plane back to the United States.

On the Spokane Indian Reservation, on the morning of that first snow, Roman sat down to piss. He could hear the television playing in the living room. He could hear Michael Jordan’s voice.

I’m back.

Sure, Roman could have stood and pissed. That would have been easier, more convenient. Just pull it out and blast away. But he wanted to be polite, even kind to Grace. That was exactly what was missing in most marriages: politeness, courtesy, good manners. He was the kind of man who wrote thank-you notes to his wife for the smallest favors.

After years of marriage, Roman had learned one basic truth: It was easy to make another person happy.

To make Grace happy, Roman sat down to piss, did the dishes at least three times a week, vacuumed every day, and occasionally threw a load of laundry into the washer, though he’d often forgotten to transfer the wet clothes into the dryer. No matter. Grace didn’t sweat the small stuff, and with each passing day she loved him more and more.

I’m back.

After his sit-down piss, Roman stood and pulled up his underwear, climbed into a pair of sweatpants hanging from the shower rod, slipped his feet into Chuck Taylor basketball shoes, and stepped into the bedroom.

Grace pretended to be asleep in their big bed. She loved this game. Still holding the basketball, Roman laid down next to her and pressed his body against hers.

“There’s a strange woman in my bed,” said Roman.

“I know,” said Grace, without opening her eyes.

“What should I do about her?”

“Let her sleep.”

Roman touched the basketball to Grace’s cheek. He wondered if she wanted to make love. She usually did, and had approached him as often as he’d approached her, but he’d always liked to delay, to think about her — the taste, smell, and sound of her — for hours, or even days, before he’d make a pass.

“Michael Jordan is coming back again,” he said.

“You can’t fool me,” said Grace. “I heard it. That was just a replay.”

“Yeah, but I wish he was coming back again. He should always come back.”

“Don’t let it give you any crazy ideas.”

Roman pulled the basketball away and leaned even closer to Grace. He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing. Other people claimed that you can’t choose who you love — it just happens! — but Grace and Roman knew that was a bunch of happy horseshit. Of course you chose who you loved. If you didn’t choose, you ended up with what was left — the drunks and abusers, the debtors and vacuums, the ones who ate their food too fast or had never read a novel. Damn, marriage was hard work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. Yet, year after year, Grace and Roman had pressed their shoulders against the stone and rolled it up the hill together.

In their marriage bed, Roman chose Grace once more and brushed his lips against her ear.

“It snowed last night,” he whispered.

“I can smell it,” said Grace, choosing him.

“What do you want for breakfast?”

“Make me some of your grandma’s salmon mush.”

Grandmother Fury had died of cancer the previous winter. On her deathbed, she’d pulled Roman close to her. She’d kissed him full on the lips and cried in his arms.

“I don’t want to go,” she’d said in Spokane.

“I know,” he’d said and felt the heat leave her body.

“I’m cold.”

“I love you.”

“Listen,” she’d said. “You better keep making that salmon mush. You’re the only one now. You have to keep it alive.”

“I’ll teach Grace.”

“She’s a good woman, that one, a good person. You better hang on to her. She could live without you easily, but you’d be lost without her.”

“She loves you as much as I do.”

“I am happy to hear that. But listen, the important thing is the salmon mush. You have to remember one thing, the big secret.”

“I know, I know, pour the milk in just before serving.”

“No, no, that’s the most obvious secret. You don’t know the biggest secret. You don’t know it. Let me tell you.”

Roman had leaned close to her ear and heard that secret. He’d listened to his grandmother’s last words and then she’d died.

On his first day at St. Jerome the Second University, Roman walked alone into the freshman dormitory. Everybody else carried new luggage, stereos, bicycles, books, but Roman carried all of his possessions in a Hefty garbage bag slung over his shoulder. He found his room, walked inside, and met his roommate.

“Hey,” said the kid with blue eyes and blond hair. “You must be my roomie. I’m Alex Weber.”

“Roman.”

“I thought you were Indian.”

“I am Indian. Roman is my name.”

“First or last?”

“The first name is Roman, the middle name is Gabriel, the last name is Fury.”

“A spectacular moniker.”

“Thank you.”

“Is that your luggage?”

Roman tossed his Hefty bag onto his bed. He was ashamed of it, his poverty, but pretended to be proud.

“Yeah,” said Roman. “I got ninety-nine of them back home. The whole matching set.”

“Scholarship student, huh?”

“Yeah. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, not at all. I’m a legacy.”

“A what?”

“My great-grandfather went to school here, as did my grandfather, my father, and now, I’m here. As long as there’s been a St. Junior, there’s been a Weber.”

“Family tradition.”

“My family is all about tradition. So, where you from? What’s your major?”

Before Roman could answer, Alex pulled out a silver flask of whiskey.

“You want a drink?” asked the legacy.

“I’m undeclared,” said Roman.

“About the drink or your major?”

“I don’t drink.”

“More for me.”

Roman looked at Alex’s side of the room. All of the white boy’s possessions still carried price tags.

“Well,” said Alex. “Get your stuff unpacked, that shouldn’t take too long, and let’s head upstairs where the lovely young women make their abodes.”

“I’m not much for parties,” said Roman. “I think I’m just going to hang around the room.”

“Suit yourself. But I’ve got to get a little tonight, you know what I mean?”

“I assume you’re referring to sexual intercourse.”

“You make it sound so romantic. Listen. My great-grandfather had sexual intercourse on his first night at St. Junior. As did my grandfather, my father, and now, me.”

“You’re a legacy.”

“Exactly. See you later, Chief.”

With a nod of his head and a click of his tongue, Alex left the room. A little stunned and bewildered by his roommate — how had the personal-tastes questionnaire put them together? — Roman sat down on his bed. Then he noticed a box sitting on the desk. It was a “WELCOME TO ST. JUNIOR” care package.

He opened the box and discovered its contents.

“Donuts,” said Roman.

Six months into their freshman year at St. Junior, Roman and Grace made love for the first time. Afterward, squeezed together in his narrow dorm room bed, they’d nervously tried to fill the silence.

“So,” he’d asked. “You must be the only Indian in New York City, enit?”

“There are lots of Indians in New York City. Lots of Mohawks.”

“Are you full-blood?”

“No, I’m Mohawk and Chinese.”

“Chinese? You’re kidding.”

“What? You have something against Chinese?”

“No, no. I just never heard of no Chinese Indians. I mean, I know black Indians and white Indians and Mexican Indians and a whole bunch of Indian Indians, but you’re the first Chinese Indian I’ve ever met. Was it some kind of Bering Strait land bridge thing?”

“No. My mom was Chinese. She was playing piano in this bar in Brooklyn. That’s where my mom and dad met.”

“Where are they now?”

“Gone, all gone.”

Over the next four years of college, they’d slept together maybe twenty more times without formal attachment, and each of them had run through quick romances with a few other people, and each had also experienced the requisite homoerotic one-night stand — both with Hawaiians, coincidentally — before he’d run up to her after his last college game, still in uniform and drenched in sweat, and hugged her close.

“You’re the best Indian I’m ever going to find,” he’d said. “Marry me.”

Not the most romantic proposal in the world, to be sure, but a true and good moment, demographically speaking.

“Okay,” she'd said.

In bed, on the Spokane Indian Reservation, eighteen years after their graduation from St. Jerome the Second, Grace ate her salmon mush, drank her coffee, and read the newspaper aloud. Roman laid back on his pillow and listened to her. This was one of their ceremonies: she’d read aloud every word of the newspaper, even the want ads, and then quiz him about the details.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s the phone number of the guy who is selling the Ping-Pong table that has only been used once?”

“Harry.”

“Uh, good remembering. That earns you a kiss, with tongue.”

“A hand job would be better.”

“God, you’re so charming.”

She smacked him with a pillow. He kissed her cheek, then walked from the bedroom into the kitchen. Still holding the basketball, he opened the refrigerator, pulled out another big bottle of Diet Pepsi, and swallowed deeply. He breathed the sweet fluid in, as if it were oxygen. He set the Pepsi back on the shelf, among a dozen other bottles, and then pulled out a donut. A maple bar. He sniffed at it, took a bite, spit it back out, and threw the donut back into the fridge.

Roman slammed the fridge shut and walked outside into the backyard. Two feet of the first snow had covered the basketball half-court. Roman looked at the snow, at the hoop and backboard rising ten feet above the snow.

Smiling, Roman gave a head fake, took a step left, and dribbled the basketball, expecting it to bounce back up into his hand.

When the ball didn’t return to his hand, Roman stared down to see the orange Rawlings embedded in the white snow. The contrast was gorgeous, like the difference between Heaven and Hell.

He had always been a religious man, had participated in all of the specific Spokane Indian ceremonies, most involving salmon, and in many of the general American Indian ceremonies like powwows and basketball tournaments. He’d also spent time in all three of the Spokane Reservation’s Christian churches, singing Assembly of God hymns, praying Presbyterian prayers, and eating Catholic Communion wafers. Roman had always known that God was elusive. All his life, Roman had been chasing God and had never once caught sight of him, or her.

During her first night at St. Junior, Grace was standing in the middle of a room full of drunken white kids when Alex Weber, the drunkest white kid, stepped up to her.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he slurred.

“Hey,” she said, a little nauseated by the whiskey smell of his breath. She’d never even sipped a glass of wine at dinner.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me. Have you enjoyed your St. Junior experience so far?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

He kissed her then, a wet kiss that was meant for her lips but landed on her chin. She pushed him away.

“Hey, listen,” she said, strangely polite. “You’re drunk, man, and you’re making a big mistake. Why don’t you just leave before you do something really stupid? How does that sound?”

She didn’t understand why she was negotiating. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” he asked.

“Yeah, you ask one question. I answer once. Then you leave. Deal?”

“Did you get in here because of affirmative action?”

“What?”

“Really. I want to know, did you get in here on account of some quota or something? Because you’re Indian, right, excuse me, I mean, Native American?”

“I belong here. Just as much as you or anybody else.”

“No, no, no, I’m not questioning your intelligence. Believe me, I’m not. Honestly. I just want to know if you got admitted because of affirmative action.”

“If I tell you, will you leave?”

“Yeah.”

“No, man, I got perfect scores on my CAT.”

“Really?”

“Truth.”

“I got in because of affirmative action.”

“What do you man? You? You’re white.”

“Well, not because of affirmative action, not exactly. I got in here because I’m a legacy. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes, I do.”

“My father went here. My father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. I’m a legacy.”

“So what?”

“So, they let me in because of my family’s money. Not because I deserve to be here. I don’t have the grades. My test scores were, like, lower than football players’.”

“Those tests don’t mean anything. They’re culturally biased.”

“But they’re biased for white guys, for me. And I flunked. I don’t deserve to be here, man. I cheated my way in. I cheated.”

Then he cried. Huge, sobbing, drunken tears.

She touched his face and then left him alone there with the rest of his tribe.

Outside his house on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Roman stared down at the orange leather ball embedded in the white snow. Then he stomped through the snow to his storage shed, and carried back a gallon of kerosene. He poured the kerosene onto the snow covering the basketball court.

After the can was empty, Roman took a step back, lit a match, and dropped it onto the kerosene-soaked snow. The fire flared up wonderfully and began to melt the snow down to the frozen ground.

Even as the snow was still burning, Roman was dribbling the ball around the court, throwing up lazy shots. He was not playing very hard, just enjoying the mechanics of the game, the physical meditation. He was out of shape and breathing hard, his breath making small clouds in the air. He was missing many more shots than he was making.

Some of the snow was still burning.

Then Grace Atwater stepped out of the house. She wore a huge red parka and big black boots. She walked onto the court, stepped around her husband, and stood directly beneath the basket. Roman stood at the free-throw line. He shot and missed. Grace rebounded the ball and threw it back to him.

“Nice shot,” she said.

“I used to be good,” said Roman. “Back when it meant something.”

“You’re still good. But I’m better.”

In the pocket of her coat, she carried a letter from a small press in Brooklyn, New York, that had agreed to publish a book of her poems. The press had consolidated all of the poems published under her various pseudonyms and would present them for the first time as her own, as her work, as her singular achievement.

Roman shot again, missed again. Grace rebounded the ball and threw it back to her spouse.

“Michael Jordan,” she said.

Roman smiled, threw up a wild hook shot that missed everything, the rim, the backboard, everything, and landed with a thud in the snow behind the court. In fact, the ball disappeared in the deep white.

Grace and Roman stared out into the snow where the ball had disappeared.

“Help,” said Roman.

“What?” asked Grace.

“Help me.”

“Always.”

Grace trotted out into the deep snow and searched for the basketball. Roman watched her with eyes stung red by the cold air. She had never been a skinny woman, not once, and was growing larger every year. She was beautiful, her long black hair dirty and uncombed. Roman patted his own prodigious belly and closed his eyes against the sudden tears welling there.

“Brilliant,” he whispered to himself. His love for his wife hit him like a strong wind and forced him to take a step or two back.

Grace found the basketball and carried it back onto the court. Holding the ball with both hands, she stood beneath the basket while Roman was now standing at least twenty feet away from the rim. In his youth, he had been a hungry and angry player, an exceptionally good shooter, as dependable as gravity, but age and weight and happiness had left him with slow hands and slower feet.

“Hey,” said Grace.

Roman opened his eyes.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not wearing anything under this coat.”

“I suspected.”

She threw the ball back to Roman, who caught it neatly.

“He’s beautiful,” she said.

“Who?”

“Michael Jordan.”

“Yes, he is,” said Roman.

Grace then opened her coat to flash her nudity at Roman. Flesh and folds of flesh. Brown skin and seventeen moles. He had counted them once when they were younger, and he hoped there were still seventeen moles now. New moles made Roman nervous, especially since the reservation skies still glowed down near the uranium mine.

Grace spun in a slow circle. Roman was shocked and pleased. Brown skin sharply contrasted with white snow. She was fat and gorgeous.

Still holding her coat open, Grace took a step toward her husband.

“You make the next shot and you can have all of this,” she said.

“What if I miss?” he asked.

She closed the coat tightly around her body.

“Then,” she said, “you’ll have to dream about me all day.”

He had dreamed about her often, had dreamed of lovemaking in rivers, in movie theaters, in sale beds in department stores, in powwow tents, but had never actually had the courage to make real love to her anywhere but a few hundred beds and the backseats of twelve different cars.

“Hey,” he said, his throat suddenly dry, his stomach suddenly nervous. “We’ve got to be to work in fifteen minutes.”

“Hey,” she said. “It’s never taken you that long before. I figure we can do it twice and you’ll still be early.”

Grace and Roman smiled.

“This is a good life,” she said.

He stared at her, at the basket, at the ball in his hands. Then he lifted the ball over his head, the leather softly brushing against his fingers, and pushed it toward the rim.

The ball floated through the air, then, magically, it caught fire. The ball burned as it floated through the air.

Roman and Grace watched it burn and were not surprised.

Then the burning ball hit the backboard, rolled around the rim, and fell through. Grace stepped toward her husband. Still burning, the ball rolled to a stop on the frozen ground. Roman stepped toward his wife.

Ceremony.