The Toughest Indian in the World (2 page)

As they waited for a table, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah watched dozens of people arrive and get seated immediately.

“I bet they don’t have reservations,” he said.

“I hate these cigarettes,” she said.

“Why do you keep buying them?”

“Because the cashier at the health-food store is cute.”

“You’re shallow.”

“Like a mud puddle.”

Mary Lynn hated going out on weeknights. She hated driving into the city. She hated waiting for a table. Standing outside the downtown restaurant, desperate to hear their names, she decided to hate Jeremiah for a few seconds. Hate, hate, hate, she thought, and then she let her hate go. She wondered if she smelled like sex, like indigenous sex, and if a white man could recognize the scent of an enemy. She’d showered, but the water pressure had been weak and the soap bar too small.

“Let’s go someplace else,” she said.

“No. Five seconds after we leave, they’ll call our names.”

“But we won’t know they called our names.”

“But I’ll feel it.”

“It must be difficult to be psychic and insecure.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

Clad in leather jackets and black jeans, standing inches apart but never quite touching, both handsome to the point of distraction, smoking crappy cigarettes that appeared to be real cigarettes, they could have been the subjects of a Schultz photograph or a Runnette poem.

The title of the photograph: “Infidelity.”

The title of the poem: “More Infidelity.”

Jeremiah’s virtue was reasonably intact, though he’d recently been involved in a flirtatious near-affair with a coworker. At the crucial moment, when the last button was about to be unbuttoned, when consummation was just a fingertip away, Jeremiah had pushed his potential lover away and said I can’t, I just can’t, I love my marriage. He didn’t admit to love for his spouse, partner, wife. No, he confessed his love for marriage, for the blessed union, for the legal document, for the shared mortgage payments, and for their four children.

Mary Lynn wondered what would happen if she grew pregnant with the Lummi’s baby. Would this full-blood baby look more Indian than her half-blood sons and daughters?

“Don’t they know who I am?” she asked her husband as they waited outside the downtown restaurant. She wasn’t pregnant; there would be no paternity tests, no revealing of great secrets. His secret: he was still in love with a white woman from high school he hadn’t seen in decades. What Mary Lynn knew: he was truly in love with the idea of a white woman from a mythical high school, with a prom queen named
If Only
or a homecoming princess named
My Life Could Have Been Different.

“I’m sure they know who you are,” he said. “That’s why we’re on the wait list. Otherwise, we’d be heading for McDonald’s or Denny’s.”

“Your kinds of places.”

“Dependable. The Big Mac you eat in Hong Kong or Des Moines tastes just like the Big Mac in Seattle.”

“Sounds like colonialism to me.”

“Colonialism ain’t all bad.”

“Put that on a bumper sticker.”

This place was called Tan Tan, though it would soon be trendy enough to go by a nickname: Tan’s. Maybe Tan’s would become T’s, and then T’s would be identified only by a slight turn of the head or a certain widening of the eyes. After that, the downhill slide in reputation would be inevitable, whether or not the culinary content and quality of the restaurant remained exactly the same or improved. As it was, Tan Tan was a pan-Asian restaurant whose ownership and chefs—head, sauce, and line—were white, though most of the wait staff appeared to be one form of Asian or another.

“Don’t you hate it?” Jeremiah asked. “When they have Chinese waiters in sushi joints? Or Korean dishwashers in a Thai noodle house?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” she said.

“No, think about it, these restaurants, these Asian restaurants, they hire Asians indiscriminately because they think white people won’t be able to tell the difference.”

“White people can’t tell the difference.”

“I can.”

“Hey, Geronimo, you’ve been hanging around Indians too long to be white.”

“Fucking an Indian doesn’t make me Indian.”

“So, that’s what we’re doing now? Fucking?”

“You have a problem with fucking?”

“No, not with the act itself, but I do have a problem with your sexual thesaurus.”

Mary Lynn and Jeremiah had met in college, when they were still called Mary and Jerry. After sleeping together for the first time, after her first orgasm and his third, Mary had turned to Jerry and said, with absolute seriousness: If this thing is going to last, we have to stop the end rhyme. She had majored in Milton and Blake. He’d been a chemical engineer since the age of seven, with the degree being only a matter of formality, so he’d had plenty of time to wonder how an Indian from the reservation could be so smart. He still wondered how it had happened, though he’d never had the courage to ask her.

Now, a little more than two decades after graduating with a useless degree, Mary Lynn worked at Microsoft for a man named Dickinson. Jeremiah didn’t know his first name, though he hoped it wasn’t Emery, and had never met the guy, and didn’t care if he ever did. Mary Lynn’s job title and responsibilities were vague, so vague that Jeremiah had never asked her to elaborate. She often worked sixty-hour weeks and he didn’t want to reward that behavior by expressing an interest in what specific tasks she performed for Bill Gates.

Waiting outside Tan Tan, he and she could smell ginger, burned rice, beer.

“Are they ever going to seat us?” she asked.

“Yeah, don’t they know who you are?”

“I hear this place discriminates against white people.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I heard once, these lawyers, bunch of white guys in Nordstrom’s suits, had to wait, like, two hours for a table.”

“Were those billable hours?”

“It’s getting hard for a white guy to find a place to eat.”

“Damn affirmative action is what it is.”

Their first child had been an accident, the result of a broken condom and a missed birth control pill. They named her Antonya, Toni for short. The second and third children, Robert and Michael, had been on purpose, and the fourth, Ariel, came after Mary Lynn thought she could no longer get pregnant.

Toni was fourteen, immature for her age, quite beautiful and narcissistic, with her translucent skin, her long blond hair, and eight-ball eyes. Botticelli eyes, she bragged after taking an Introduction to Art class. She never bothered to tell anybody she was Indian, mostly because nobody asked.

Jeremiah was quite sure that his daughter, his Antonya, had lost her virginity to the pimply quarterback of the junior varsity football team. He found the thought of his daughter’s adolescent sexuality both curious and disturbing. Above all else, he believed that she was far too special to sleep with a cliché, let alone a junior varsity cliché.

Three months out of every year, Robert and Michael were the same age. Currently, they were both eleven. Dark-skinned, with their mother’s black hair, strong jawline, and endless nose, they looked Indian, very Indian. Robert, who had refused to be called anything other than Robert, was the smart boy, a math prodigy, while Mikey was the basketball player.

When Mary Lynn’s parents called from the reservation, they always asked after the boys, always invited the boys out for the weekend, the holidays, and the summer, and always sent the boys more elaborate gifts than they sent the two girls.

When Jeremiah had pointed out this discrepancy to Mary Lynn, she had readily agreed, but had made it clear that his parents also paid more attention to the boys. Jeremiah never mentioned it again, but had silently vowed to love the girls a little more than he loved the boys.

As if love were a thing that could be quantified, he thought.

He asked himself: What if I love the girls more because they look more like me, because they look more white than the boys?

Towheaded Ariel was two, and the clay of her personality was just beginning to harden, but she was certainly petulant and funny as hell, with the ability to sleep in sixteen-hour marathons that made her parents very nervous. She seemed to exist in her own world, enough so that she was periodically monitored for incipient autism. She treated her siblings as if they somehow bored her, and was the kind of kid who could stay alone in her crib for hours, amusing herself with all sorts of personal games and imaginary friends.

Mary Lynn insisted that her youngest daughter was going to be an artist, but Jeremiah didn’t understand the child, and despite the fact that he was her father and forty-three years older, he felt inferior to Ariel.

He wondered if his wife was ever going to leave him because he was white.

When Tan Tan’s doors swung open, laughter and smoke rolled out together.

“You got another cigarette?” he asked.

“Quit calling them cigarettes. They’re not cigarettes. They’re more like rose bushes. Hell, they’re more like the shit that rose bushes grow in.”

“You think we’re going to get a table?”

“By the time we get a table, this place is going to be very unpopular.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“Do you?”

“If you do.”

“We told the baby-sitter we’d be home by ten.”

They both wished that Toni were responsible enough to baby-sit her siblings, rather than needing to be sat along with them.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Nine.”

“Let’s go home.”

Last Christmas, when the kids had been splayed out all over the living room, buried to their shoulders in wrapping paper and expensive toys, Mary Lynn had studied her children’s features, had recognized most of her face in her sons’ faces and very little of it in her daughters’, and had decided, quite facetiously, that the genetic score was tied.

We should have another kid, she’d said to Jeremiah, so we’ll know if this is a white family or an Indian family.

It’s a family family, he’d said, without a trace of humor.

Only a white guy would say that, she’d said.

Well, he’d said, you married a white guy.

The space between them had grown very cold at that moment, in that silence, and perhaps one or both of them might have said something truly destructive, but Ariel had started crying then, for no obvious reason, relieving both parents of the responsibility of finishing that particular conversation. During the course of their relationship, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah had often discussed race as a concept, as a foreign country they occasionally visited, or as an enemy that existed outside their house, as a destructive force they could fight against as a couple, as a family. But race was also a constant presence, a house-guest and permanent tenant who crept around all the rooms in their shared lives, opening drawers, stealing utensils and small articles of clothing, changing the temperature.

Before he’d married Mary Lynn, Jeremiah had always believed there was too much talk of race, that white people were all too willing to be racist and that brown people were just as willing and just as racist. As a rational scientist, he’d known that race was primarily a social construct, illusionary, but as the husband of an Indian woman and the father of Indian children, he’d since learned that race, whatever its construction, was real. Now, there were plenty of white people who wanted to eliminate the idea of race, to cast it aside as an unwanted invention, but it was far too late for that. If white people are the mad scientists who created race, thought Jeremiah, than we created race so we could enslave black people and kill Indians, and now race has become the Frankenstein monster that has grown beyond our control. Though he’d once been willfully blind, Jeremiah had learned how to recognize that monster in the faces of whites and Indians and in their eyes.

Long ago, Jeremiah and Mary Lynn had both decided to challenge those who stared by staring back, by flinging each other against walls and tongue-kissing with pornographic élan.

Long ago, they’d both decided to respond to any questions of why, how, what, who, or when by simply stating: Love is Love. They knew it was romantic bullshit, a simpleminded answer only satisfying for simpleminded people, but it was the best available defense.

Listen, Mary Lynn had once said to Jeremiah, asking somebody why they fall in love is like asking somebody why they believe in God.

You start asking questions like that, she had added, and you’re either going to start a war or you’re going to hear folk music.

You think too much, Jeremiah had said, rolling over and falling asleep.

Then, in the dark, as Jeremiah slept, Mary Lynn had masturbated while fantasizing about an Indian man with sundance scars on his chest.

After they left Tan Tan, they drove a sensible and indigenous Ford Taurus over the 520 bridge, back toward their house in Kirkland, a five-bedroom rancher only ten blocks away from the Microsoft campus. Mary Lynn walked to work. That made her feel privileged. She estimated there were twenty-two American Indians who had ever felt even a moment of privilege.

“We still have to eat,” she said as she drove across the bridge. She felt strange. She wondered if she was ever going to feel normal again.

“How about Taco Bell drive-thru?” he asked.

“You devil, you’re trying to get into my pants, aren’t you?”

Impulsively, he dropped his head into her lap and pressed his lips against her black-jeaned crotch. She yelped and pushed him away. She wondered if he could smell her, if he could smell the Lummi Indian. Maybe he could, but he seemed to interpret it as something different, as something meant for him, as he pushed his head into her lap again. What was she supposed to do? She decided to laugh, so she did laugh as she pushed his face against her pubic bone. She loved the man for reasons she could not always explain. She closed her eyes, drove in that darkness, and felt dangerous.

Halfway across the bridge, Mary Lynn slammed on the brakes, not because she’d seen anything—her eyes were still closed—but because she’d felt something. The car skidded to a stop just inches from the bumper of a truck that had just missed sliding into the row of cars stopped ahead of it.