I immediately noticed my bully when I walked into the bookstore. I don’t even remember the two other Spokane Indian women who’d accompanied her. It was the only the second time I’d seen her since I’d exiled her from Reardan more than twenty years earlier.
I’d first seen her in the reservation trading post during the summer after I’d exiled her. I spotted her and tried to dodge behind a shelf. But she saw me and rushed at me, cursing. I don’t remember exactly what she said. But she was furious at me. She knew that I had exiled her. She hated me for it.
I was sheepish, defiant, amused, and angry.
I don’t remember what I said.
I wish I would have said, “I see that I hurt you. Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt me over the years?”
But I imagine I instead offered her an empty apology, and I assume she rejected it.
So, now, more than a decade after that encounter, my bully was sitting in the front row at my reading. I wasn’t even remotely the Indian boy she knew in Reardan or Wellpinit. I had become the kind of Indian man who can talk glorious shit to talk-show hosts and U.S. presidents on national television.
But, damn it, my bully still made me nervous. She was still smart and beautiful. She was still intimidating.
I heard “Junior High Honky” echoing inside my always-fragile head.
I performed my poems and stories. I improvised stories and jokes. I interacted with the audience.
And I watched my bully take notes the entire time.
Battle plans, I assumed.
And I thought, “Holy shit! She is going to verbally challenge me in front of four hundred of my most ardent fans—in front of my hometown crowd. Is she really this brave and stupid? Doesn’t she know how good I am onstage? Can’t she see how I would win any war of insults against her?”
I have to admit that I was absolutely overjoyed at the thought of the impending confrontation.
And then I looked at my mother. At my sisters. At my nieces. At my female cousins. I looked at those Spokane Indians—those Native American women—and I thought about how much sorrow and pain they’d endured in their lives, how Native women everywhere are so targeted for violence by tribal and American society.
I love those Native women I call my family and friends.
But I don’t love my bully. Not even a little bit.
However, I realized I had no need to win some imaginary fight with her. I had no desire to hurt her feelings. I didn’t want to walk the circle of animosity anymore. I wasn’t going to forgive her. I’m not a sap. She would have to actually apologize in order for me to think about forgiving her. But, stop, stop, stop, I wanted that shit to stop.
So when she raised her hand, I politely called on her three separate times and answered questions about tribal responsibility, alcoholism, and negative stereotypes of Native Americans.
I declared a truce with her, at least within myself. Or maybe it’s only a partial truce because a half-truce is really just a surrender, right?
In any case, I hope there is a future powwow when she, an elderly Spokane Indian woman, asks me, an elderly Spokane Indian man, for an owl dance.
“Yes, of course,” I will say.
It won’t be romantic. It won’t be all that friendly. But it will be a clumsy acknowledgment of our lifelong bond, however frayed.
On a Saturday morning in a hotel room in Bellingham—in an Oxford Suites that had three-dimensional art in the bathroom that spelled WASH in huge wooden capital letters—I said to my wife, “I am going to get naked and lie facedown on the bed. And I want you to look at my back. I want you to study my back. I want you to study my scars. I want you to tell me what they look like. I want you to touch the scars. I want you to trace their outlines with your fingertips. I want to feel you feeling my scars.”
Diane did as she was asked. She touched the small scars. Ran her fingertips along the longer scars.
“What do they look like?” I asked.
“They’re lighter than they used to be.”
“Huh,” I said. “Take some pictures with your phone and e-mail them to me. I will look at them later.”
I thought it might take me weeks to look at the photos of my scarred back. Maybe months. Maybe I would never look at them.
So I was surprised to find myself downloading those photos onto my iPad only an hour later.
Diane was driving us home to Seattle. She almost always wants to drive, and I almost always want to sit in the passenger seat and daydream.
“Okay,” I said. “I am looking at them now.”
I laughed at how pale my back had become. I’ve lived in sunless Seattle for two decades. I’m an introverted writer who’d rather be inside reading or writing. And I haven’t played outdoor shirts-and-skins pickup basketball in a long time.
Looking at my pale back, I realized that it had been at least fifteen years since I had been topless in direct sunlight.
So my skin had grown pale. Had grown from brown to slightly tan.
But my acne scars had also grown pale.
My skin and my scars were now almost the same color.
“You can’t really see my scars all that much anymore,” I said.
“Only if you look really close,” Diane said. “Only if you’re looking for them.”
“I don’t look burned anymore,” I said.
“You’re kind of mottled,” Diane said. “Like a feather.”
My wife and I traveled toward our home, toward our waiting sons. I closed my eyes and dreamed that I was entirely made of feathers. I dreamed I could hover like one feather, like a man made of feathers. And then I dreamed that each of my scars was a bird. And then I flew.
160.
Flight Hours
That bird, small and brown, wrecked Against our kitchen window And crashed dead to our deck.
“Avian suicide,” I said
And walked out to retrieve Its broken-feathered body—
And then I thought of my mother’s coffin being carried to the grave by her pallbearers. And realized that I would be the bird’s pallbearer. And that realization made me feel responsible for the bird, as if its death needed to matter, as if it weren’t just one more member of an essentially endless species. So I sat beside that dead bird and improvise-hummed an honor song—
And startled when that bird lifted Its head as if my song were a gift That brought it back to life.
Of course, I did not resurrect That bird. It had knocked Itself out against our window
And was now regaining
Consciousness. But had it broken Something? Maybe a wing?
Would it be able to fly?
Perhaps I’d have to watch it Simply and slowly die—