Take Us to the River

very short fiction

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I met my wife, Sheila, at Mother's Kitchen in Spokane. They served breakfast 24 hours a day and had a small after hours private bar in the back where drunk Indians would get drunker after closing time at the Buck & Doe, the Indian tavern around the corner. Indians didn’t own the Buck & Doe. We just monopolized that tavern as customers. But we didn’t monopolize Mother’s. All sorts of people dined there. It was a United Nations of egg-eaters. Sheila worked as a waitress but she also shared ownership of the place with her then-husband, who was the head cook. His name was Stu. He was a veteran of the Korean War with four dimple scars on his belly—bullet wounds. Sometimes, he'd finger those scars like they were the tone holes on a flute and whistle a pretty little melody. He and Sheila grew up in separate farm towns only an hour's drive outside of Spokane. Mother's Kitchen was their American dream come true. They were white. I was one of them drunk Indians nomading around downtown Spokane.

Stu liked Indians because his best friend in high school was an Indian. Sheila liked Indians because her high school sweetheart was an Indian.

White people get more nostalgic about Indians than we get about ourselves. Everybody loves Indians. Except us Indians. Every one of us is named Self Doubt.

I was still handsome back in those days. My face was alcoholic-puffy but my belly was flat. And, one night, Sheila followed me outside, led me into a dark doorway, and started kissing me like she was a horny shaman whose tongue was gonna heal me. I didn't kiss her back at first because I was so surprised. She'd never even flirted with me before that big smooch. But then my tongue caught up to hers and we reached into each other's pants and did the things that make your lover gasp.

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Stu cried when Sheila asked him for a divorce. Then he went missing. Three weeks later, they found his body washed up on the bank of the Little Spokane River. The cops brought me in for questioning.

"Did you know what happened?" they asked.

"No," I said.

"But you stole his woman," they said.

"Sheila ain't a thing to be stolen," I said. "She's a human. And she loved Stu until the minute she loved me more."

The cops interviewed all sorts of Indians. Nobody had anything useful to say. Stu was alive and then he wasn’t. Nobody had seen or heard anything. The cops decided that Stu had drunkenly fallen into the river and drowned.

They didn’t care enough to give him an autopsy.

Slow-motion suicide, they said.

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When our baby daughter was six months old, Sheila swallowed a bottle of pills. Nobody in those days knew about postpartum depression.

So I became the single father of a half-white kid. Her name was Judith. Judy. She was white-skinned and light-haired. We didn't look anything alike. If I was a woman then white strangers might have thought I was the nanny instead of a parent. And, sometimes, people thought I’d kidnapped my own child. Somebody once called the cops on me.

Just after Judy turned one year old I sold Mother’s Kitchen for pennies and moved back to the reservation so my mother and aunties could help me raise her. By the time Judy was a teenager, she'd picked up many rez nicknames because she was so pale—White Bread, Alpine, Blizzard, Vanilla, Milky Way, and Sunshine. But she was smart like her mother, and just as rezzy as all the dark kids, and married an Indian boy after they graduated high school. He was a logger and treated her well.

Judy didn't get depressed after she give birth to fraternal twins—a son and daughter. Jake and Jessica. Unlike her mother, Judy was electric with motherhood. She loved that her children were as brown as their father.

In my old age, I became more and more traditional. I sobered up. Danced powwow. Fished and hunted. I was born-again Indian. Both Jake and Jessica brought down their first deer while I was guiding them. Jessica missed her first shot at an elk but keeps begging me to take her out into the woods again. Jake is done with hunting, he says. He wants the blood to only be metaphor. He plays guitar and sings about pain.

Indian Bob Dylan, I say to him.

Indian Kurt Cobain, he says back.

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It was a Monday morning at 3 a.m. when I killed Stu. We were drinking alone in the private bar of Mother's Kitchen when he passed out sitting at a table. He'd been treating me like two people—the man who’d ended his marriage and the man that he believed could give him back his Sheila. He cursed and cried. He slapped me a few times. Half-punched me in the chest. Hugged me, too, and said he was trying to forgive me. He was a war veteran. Still half-soldier. I knew he kept a pistol beneath the cash register in Mother's. And I knew he kept a pistol in the glove compartment of his car. I was a little bit scared of what he might do to me. So, after he passed out, I pulled him onto the floor then pinched his nose shut and covered his mouth until he stopped breathing.

It was just before dawn when I dragged Stu out of my car and pushed him into the river. He was a small man but death had turned him into a burden like no other. I can still feel his body in my hands. I still have nighmares about pushing him into the water.

I haven’t swam a stroke since I murdered him. I come from a river tribe. A salmon tribe. The river is holy. The salmon is holy. But I’m an unholy man who doesn’t deserve anything sacred.

"Did you kill him?" Sheila asked me a few weeks after Stu disappeared.

"No," I said.

She never asked me again.

Part of me thinks she believed me. Part of me thinks I'm best liar who's ever lived. And part of me thinks that maybe Sheila swallowed those pills because she knew what I’d done.

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Sheila is buried in Spokane. But I'll be buried on the rez in the Catholic cemetery with my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and half of my cousins.

I'm not Catholic. I'm not any kind of Christian. But I believe in Hell. And I know that's where I'm going after my life ends.

I'll be negotiating with Satan about how hot I'm gonna burn.

You killed an innocent man, he'll say,

I raised a good daughter, I'll say, and my grandchildren are good, too.

Do you think that’s enough to lower the flames? he’ll ask me. Do you know there are men in Hell who are less sinful than you?

Dear Satan, I’ll say, if you add up my life, I think maybe the fire should only be on simmer, just a few degrees below the boiling point.

Yeah, I hope that none of you hear me screaming. I hope that all you hear is me repeating the names of everybody I ever loved.