The Speed Chronicles (4 page)

He found her in a 7-Eleven in the Indian part of town.

Yeah, as scared as she was, she was still hiding among Indians. Yeah, we're addictive. You have to be careful around us because we'll teach you how to cry epic tears and you'll never want to stop.

Anyway, you might think he wanted to kill her. Or break some bones. But no, he was crazy in a whole different way. In the aisle of that 7-Eleven, he dropped to his knees and asked for her hand in marriage.

Really.

He proclaimed it just like that too.

May I have your hand in marriage? he said to her.

So they got married; I was the best man.

In the parking lot after the ceremony, Junior and Jeri smoked meth with a bunch of toothless wonders.

Fucking zombies walking everywhere on the rez.

Monster movie all the time.

A thousand years from now, archaeologists are going to be mystified by all the toothless skulls they find buried in the ancient reservation mud.

There was no honeymoon. What rez Indian can afford such a thing? They did spend a night in the tribal casino. That's free for any Indian newlyweds. Mighty generous, I guess, letting tribal members sleep free in the casino they're supposed to own.

They moved into a trailer house down near Tshimakain Creek and they got all happy and safe for maybe six months.

Then one night, after she wouldn't have sex with him, he punched her so hard that he knocked out her front teeth.

That was it for her.

She left him and lived on the rez in plain sight. All proud for leaving, she mocked him by carrying her freedom around like her own kind of war paint. And I loved her for it.

Stand up, woman, I thought, stand up and kick the shit out of your demons.

Junior seemed to accept it okay. I should've known better, but he talked a good line of shit.

Like the poet wrote, he said, nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost! My cousin was quoting Robert Frost! I guess he truly earned that GED he got in prison.

Late at night, when I'm trying to sleep, I think of all the ways things could have gone. How things could have been better. But in reality, there's only one way it went.

Jeri fell in love with the white dude we called Dr. Scalpel, though he went by Dr. Bob. He was the half-assed general practitioner who also worked at the Indian clinic and was just counting the days until he paid off his scholarship and could flee the rez. In the meantime, he'd found a warm body to keep him warm through the too-many-damn-Indians night.

Everybody deserves love. Well, most everybody deserves love. And Jeri certainly needed some brightness, but Dr. Bob was all dark and bitter and accelerated. He punched her in the face on their third date.

Ten minutes after we heard the news, Junior and I were speeding toward Dr. Bob's house located right next to the rez border down near the Spokane River. Yeah, he had to live on the rez, but he'd only live fifteen feet past the border.

I'm going to fuck him up, Junior said, you can't be hitting my woman.

I just rode along and never brought up the fact that Junior had hit his woman plenty of times. Yeah, I was riding shotgun for a woman-beating man looking to get revenge on another woman-beating man.

I should have been stronger. I should have been stronger. Meaning: I was kicking my face punched by my shame.

I kept thinking: Junior went to prison. He was a victim. And I ignored him. I let him suffer alone. So maybe it's okay if I let him punch Dr. Bob a few times. Maybe a little bit of violence will prevent a whole lot of violence.

But it doesn't work that way. Nowhere in human history has a small act of violence prevented larger acts from happening.

Small pain gets infected and causes big pain.

All the while he was driving, Junior was snorting whatever he could find within arm's reach. I think he snorted up some spilled sugar and salt. Any powder was good. So he was amped, he was all feedback and static, when we arrived at Dr. Bob's door.

Junior raced ahead of me and rhino-charged into the house. And once inside, he pulled a pistol from somewhere and whipped Dr. Bob across the face.

A fucking .45!

I'd seen tons of hunting rifles on the rez, but I'd never seen a pistol.

Junior whipped Dr. Bob maybe five times across the face and then kicked him in the balls and threw him against the wall. And Dr. Bob, the so-called healer, slid all injured and bloody to the floor.

You do not fuck with my possessions, Junior said to Bob.

There it was. The real reason for all of this. It was hatred and revenge, not love. Maybe at that point, all Junior could see was that Aryan who'd raped him a thousand times. Maybe Junior could only see the white lightning of colonialism. I don't mean to get so intellectual, but I'm trying to explain it to you. I'm trying to explain myself to myself.

I watched Junior lean over and slap Dr. Bob three or four times.

He's had enough, I said, let's get out of here.

Junior stood and laughed.

Yeah, he said, this fucker will never hit another woman again.

We walked toward the door together. I thought it was over. But Junior turned back, pressed that pistol against Bob's forehead, and pulled the trigger.

I will never forget how that head exploded.

It was like a comet smashing through a planet.

I couldn't move. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. But then Junior did something worse. He flipped over the doctor's body, pulled down his pants and underwear, and shoved that pistol into Bob's ass.

Even then, I knew there was some battered train track stretching between Junior's torture in prison and this violation of Bob's body.

No more, I said, no more.

Junior stared at me with such hatred, such pain, that I thought he might kill me too. But then that moment of rage passed and Junior's eyes filled with something worse: logic.

We have to get rid of the body, he said.

I shook my head. At least I think I shook my head.

You owe me, he said.

That was it. I couldn't deny him. I helped him clean up the blood and bone and brain, and wrap Dr. Bob in a blanket, and throw him into the trunk of the car.

I know where to dump him, Junior said.

So we drove deep into the forest, to the end of a dirt road that had started, centuries ago, as a game trail. Then we carried Bob's body through the deep woods toward a slow canyon that Junior had discovered during his tree-painting job.

Nobody will ever find the body, he said.

As we trudged along, mosquitoes and flies, attracted by the blood, swarmed us. I must have gotten bit a hundred times or more. Soon enough, Junior and I were bleeding onto Bob's body.

Blood for blood. Blood with blood.

After a few hours of dragging that body through the wilderness, we reached Junior's canyon. It was maybe ten feet across and choked with brush and small trees.

He's going to get caught up on the branches, I said.

Jesus, I thought, now I'm terrified of my own logic.

Just throw him real hard, Junior said.

So we somehow found the strength to lift Dr. Bob above our heads and we hurled him into the canyon. His body crashed through the green and came to rest, unseen, somewhere below.

Maybe you want to say a few words, Junior said.

Don't be so fucking cruel, I said, we've done something awful here.

Junior laughed again.

As we trudged back toward the car, Junior started talking childhood memories. I don't want to bore you with the details but here's the meaning: He and I, as babies, had slept in the same crib, and we'd lost our virginities on the same night within five feet of each other, and now we had killed together, so we were more than cousins, more than best friends, and more than brothers. We were the same person.

Of course, I kept reminding myself that I didn't touch Dr. Bob. I didn't pistol whip him or punch him or slap him. And I certainly didn't shoot him.

But I was still guilty. I knew that. Though I couldn't figure out exactly what I was guilty of.

When we made it back to the car, Junior stopped and stared up at the stars newly arrived in the sky.

You're going to keep quiet about this, he said.

I stared at the pistol in his hand. He saw me staring at the pistol in his hand. I knew he was deciding whether to kill me or not. And I guess his love for me, or whatever it was that he called love, won him over. He turned and threw the gun as far as he could into the dark.

We drove back down that dirt road in silence. As he dropped me at my house, he cried a little, his first sign of weakness, and hugged me.

You owe me, he said again.

After he drove away, I climbed on the roof of my house. I don't know why I did that. It seemed like the right thing to do. Folks would later call me Snoopy, and I would laugh with them, but at the time it seemed like such an utterly serious act.

I suppose, even if it became funny later, that it was the ultimate serious act.

I needed to be in a place where I had never been before to think about the grotesquely new thing that had happened, and what I needed to do about it.

I don't know when I fell asleep, but I woke, cold and wet, the next morning, climbed off the roof, and went to the tribal police. A couple hours after I told them the story, the Feds showed up. And a few hours after that, I led them all to Dr. Bob's body.

Later that night, as the police lay siege to his trailer house, Junior shot himself in the head.

No way I'm going back to prison, he said.

I wasn't charged with any crime. I could have been, I suppose, and maybe should have been. But I guess I'd done the right thing, or maybe something close enough to the right thing.

And Jeri? She left the rez, of course. I hear she's working on another rez down south. I pray that she never falls in love again. I'm not blaming her for what happened. I just think she's better off alone. Who isn't better off alone?

I didn't go to Junior's funeral. I figured somebody might shoot me if I did. Most everybody thought I was evil for turning against Junior. Meaning: I was the bad guy because I betrayed another Indian.

And yes, it's true that I betrayed Junior. But if betrayal can be righteous, then I believe I was righteous. But who knows except God?

Anyway, in honor of Junior, I started war dancing. I had to buy my regalia from a Sioux Indian who didn't give a shit about my troubles, but that was okay. I think the Sioux make the best outfits anyway.

So I danced. Well, I practiced dancing first in front of a mirror. I'd put a powwow CD in my computer and I'd stumble in circles around my living room. After a few months of this, I got enough grace and courage to make my public debut.

It was a minor powwow in the high school gym. Just another social event during a boring early December.

At first, nobody recognized me. I'd war-painted my whole face black. I wanted to look like a villain, I guess.

Anyway, as I danced, a few women recognized me and started talking to everybody around them. Soon enough, the whole powwow knew it was me swinging my feathers. A few folks jeered and threw curses my way. But most just watched me. I felt the aboriginal heat of their eyes. And I started crying. I'd like to think that I was weeping for my lost cousin, but I think I was weeping for my whole tribe.

SHERMAN ALEXIE
is the best-selling author of
War Dances
, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He is also the author of
Reservation Blues, Indian Killer, The Toughest Indian in the World, Ten Little Indians, Flight, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Business of Fancy-dancing
, and
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
, winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Also a filmmaker, stand-up comic, and public speaker, Alexie lives in Seattle, WA, with his wife and two sons.

bad

by jerry stahl

T
HE RUSH! THE TERROR! The acrid stink of your sweat soaking through furniture three blocks away! Speaking of stink—what
is
that? Did somebody piss under your arms? Is that possible? Could they have pissed in your armpits three weeks ago, and you just now noticed? Like, say, when you get in a cab, and the seat's wet after a pack of frat boys beer-up too hard and leave Bud puddles. Hop inside and—QUESTION:
why does your God hate you?
—you hear the splat when you hit the seat. But—ANSWER:
because you're a tweaker!
—you don't know you're full wet-ass till you squish out of the cab. (“People never call the police until it's wet-ass time.” Al Pacino,
Sea of Love
.) Speed keeps you so clammy you can't feel damp. Just one of the many advantages!

Fucking alcoholics! Where's the dignity? Remember that dancer—Lola? Lurleen? Patricia?—with the misspelled devil ink on her neck.
HAIL SATIN!
“It's not a mistake, it's a statement!” It
was
Lurleen. She had some kind of jailhouse harelip that slurred her words to the left. “You ass-maggot, you think I'm a fucking
creatine
?” Upscale. After eleven vodka tonics you'd see day-workers hand her five sweaty dollar bills to lift her skirt and geeze in her labia, which weirdly resembled a gorilla ear. You'd seen one once, in a French Quarter voodoo store. It was supposed to bring its owner lifelong protection and success. From the moment the Sisters of Marie Laveau Gift Shop door hissed shut behind you, you knew you should have bought the thing. Everything would have been different. Why are you such an asshole?