I vividly remember moving from that old house into our HUD house only fifty yards away. The front and back stairs were not yet built, so we had to climb a ladder to get into the place. Ludicrous, I know, but it felt magical. I remember a photograph of us four children posing on the ladder. We looked more like mesa-dwelling Hopi Indians than salmon-fishing Spokane Indians.
My little sister doesn’t remember that photograph. She doubts it exists.
“You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.”
“That’s just a fancy way of calling me a liar,” I said.
“If the moccasin fits, then wear it,” she said.
I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”
Simon, a beautiful storyteller, doesn’t remember ever saying such a thing.
“That sounds like something I might say,” he said to me. “But I don’t know if I have ever said that particular thing.”
I don’t remember when I first learned of the quote. Did I read it in one of Simon’s poems or stories? If so, then why doesn’t Simon remember that he wrote it? Can a writer forget something that he’s written in one of his own books? Yes, of course. I wrote my first novel over two decades ago, and fans often stump me by asking questions about passages that I don’t remember writing. So perhaps I read that quote somewhere else and have mistakenly attributed it to Simon. Or did I hear somebody else quote Simon? My college writing teacher, Alex Kuo, is a big fan of literary-inspired practical jokes and postmodern riddles, so maybe he’s the one who quoted or misquoted Simon.
“Do you know this Simon Ortiz quote about fiction and truth?” I asked Alex. “Did you tell me he said it?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t remember that quote. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t tell you I knew it sometime in the past. I could have invented it. Or maybe you invented the quote and are giving me partial credit for citing the quote while fully crediting Simon for originally inventing the quote.”
“So maybe I’m the one who thought it first?” I said. “And I want to honor you and Simon.”
“Well,” Alex said. “Crediting your thoughts to your mentors sounds more like you’re honoring yourself.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “And sad. Is my ego the source of all my deception and self-deception?”
“Perhaps,” Alex said. “Since you’ve just invented this entire conversation about storytelling and truth that you and I never had, and put it in the first chapter of your memoir, then I’m just going to call you the unreliable narrator of your own life.”
So, okay, maybe I am unreliable to some degree. But, despite what my teachers, parents, friends, siblings, and I say about my storytelling—about my labyrinthine fantasy life—I also know that I have an excellent memory.
To quote a song lyric I vaguely remember from a song and band I can’t fully recall: I remember everything.
I remember that my mother and father hosted a New Year’s Eve party in our HUD house on the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1973. Or 1972 or 1974.
I was only seven years old, but I knew, with a fundamentalist’s fervor, that the party was potentially lethal. Not because of my mother and father’s actions, but because of their inattentions. They were alcoholics who’d get what they laughingly called bottle-blind, as in “I was so bottle-blind that I didn’t even realize I’d driven off the road until I woke up with a pine tree branch sticking through the car windshield about four inches from my nose.” That’s what my father said—or approximately what he said—after his eleventh or nineteenth or twenty-seventh drunken car wreck.
So, yes, my bottle-blind parents invited everybody on the reservation to that dangerous New Year’s Eve party, including two Indian men who were widely believed—who were known—to have committed murders.
One of those murderers, a half-white little guy with a wicked temper and a silly-ass gunfighter’s mustache, had supposedly buried his victim’s body in Manito Park, in Spokane. An anonymous person had called into a secret witness phone line and claimed that my father, while not guilty of the murder, knew where the body was buried. My father had twice been in prison for burglary and forgery, so he was certainly known to the police. They must have taken that anonymous call seriously because they asked my father to come in and answer a few questions. And I still find it strange and hilarious that my father took me, only nine or ten years old, along on that little cold-case adventure.
As my father drove us from the reservation to the police station in Spokane, he told me that he’d only heard the same rumors about the murder as everybody else.
“They could talk to every Indian around here,” my father said. “And we’d all tell the same story.”
My father was a shy and gentle man, even when drunk, so I don’t believe that he was capable of physically hurting anybody. But he was also an alcoholic who was exceedingly loyal to other indigenous folks and deeply suspicious of any authority figure. I knew that my father would protect any Indian against any investigation by white men. My father wouldn’t throw a punch or pull a trigger or name names. Silence was his short bow and quiver of arrows.
I didn’t witness that interview—or maybe I should call it a casual interrogation—and my father never shared any of the details. I just waited for hours in our family car outside the police station as he told the story—or did not tell the story—about his alleged role or nonrole in that murder. He must have been innocent of any wrongdoing because he was free to drive us back to the reservation that day and was never compelled to speak of the incident again.
But I still wonder if there is a body buried in Manito Park. I still wonder if my father knew where to find that body. I know exactly where my dead father is buried. Maybe I’ll interrogate his tombstone the next time I visit that reservation cemetery.
“How many murderers did you know?” I will ask the tombstone again and again.
And the tombstone will never answer. Because the dead have only the voices we give to them.
The other murderer at that New Year’s Eve party was a Vietnam War veteran. Not long after he’d been honorably discharged and returned to the reservation, he and some Indian friends attacked a white man. According to the stories, the war vet kicked that white man’s eye clean out of his head and then dumped him to die in a roadside ditch. Today, some folks say the man survived the beating—and that cold night spent unconscious in the dirt—and moved to another state. Some say the beating wasn’t that bad in the first place. It was just an ordinary fight—as ordinary as a fight can be when it’s five or six Indian men assaulting one white man. Some say the white man did lose his eye but blamed himself for the fight and for his injury. Some say he became a better man because of his missing eye. Yes, some folks have turned that murder story into a mythical tale about redemption. Some folks—some creative storytellers—have changed a violent Indian man into the spiritual teacher of a one-eyed white wanderer.