Are like two old drunks
Who spend their whole lives in the bars
Swallowing down all those lies and lies and lies
Sometimes, father, you and I
Are like dirty ghosts
Who wear the same sheets every day
As one more piece of us just dies and dies and dies
(repeat chorus)
Sometimes, father, you and I
Are like a three-legged horse
Who can’t get across the finish line
No matter how hard he tries and tries and tries
Coyote Springs returned to the Spokane Indian Reservation without much fanfare. Thomas drove through the late night quiet, the kind of quiet that frightened visitors from the city. As he pulled up in his driveway, the rest of the band members woke up, and the van’s headlights illuminated the old Indian man passed out on the lawn.
“Who is that?” Victor asked. “Is it my dad or your dad?”
“It’s not your dad,” Junior said. “Your dad is dead.”
“Oh, yeah, enit?” Victor asked. “Well, whose dad is it?”
“It ain’t my dad,” Junior said. “He’s dead, too.”
Coyote Springs climbed out of the van, walked up to the man passed out on the lawn, and rolled him over.
“That’s your dad, enit?” Junior asked Thomas.
Thomas leaned down for a closer look.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Victor said. “That’s old Samuel.”
“Is he breathing?” Junior said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, then leave him there,” Victor said.
Thomas shook his father a little and said his name a few times. He had lost count of the number of times he’d saved his father, how many times he’d driven to some reservation tavern to pick up his dad, passed out in a back booth. Once a month, he bailed his father out of jail for drunk and disorderly behavior. That had become his father’s Indian name: Drunk and Disorderly.
“He’s way out of it,” Victor said.
“He’s out for the night,” Junior said.
Junior and Victor shrugged their shoulders, walked into Thomas’s house, and looked for somewhere to sleep. Decorated veterans of that war between fathers and sons, Junior and Victor knew the best defense was sleep. They saw too many drunks littering the grass of the reservation; they rolled the drunks over and stole their money. When they were under age, they slapped those drunks awake and pushed them into the Trading Post to buy beer. Now, when they saw Samuel Builds-the-Fire passed out on the lawn, they crawled into different corners of Thomas’s house and fell right to sleep.
“Ain’t they going to help?” Chess asked.
“It’s my father,” Thomas said. “I have to handle this myself.”
But Chess and Checkers helped Thomas carry his father into the house and lay him down on the kitchen table. The three sat in chairs around the table and stared at Samuel Builds-the-Fire, who breathed deep in his alcoholic stupor.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” Chess and Checkers said.
“Yeah, me, too.”
Chess and Checkers were uncomfortable. They hated to see that old Indian man so helpless and hopeless; they hated to see the father’s features in his son’s face. It’s hard not to see a father’s life as prediction for his son’s.
“Our father was like this, too,” Chess said. “Just like this.”
“But he never drank at all until Backgammon died,” Checkers said.
“Where’s your dad now?” Thomas asked.
“He’s gone.”
The word gone echoed all over the reservation. The reservation was gone itself, just a shell of its former self, just a fragment of the whole. But the reservation still possessed power and rage, magic and loss, joys and jealousy. The reservation tugged at the lives of its Indians, stole from them in the middle of the night, watched impassively as the horses and salmon disappeared. But the reservation forgave, too. Sam Bone vanished between foot falls on the way to the Trading Post one summer day and reappeared years later to finish his walk. Thomas, Chess, and Checkers heard the word gone shake the foundation of the house.
“Where’s he gone to?” Thomas asked.
“He’s just gone,” Checkers said. “He’s AWOL. He’s MIA.”
The secondhand furniture in Thomas’s house moved an inch to the west.
“It wasn’t always this way,” Thomas said and touched his father’s hand. “It wasn’t always this way.
Samuel slept on the table while Thomas closed his eyes and told the story:
“Way back when, my father was an active alcoholic only about three months of every year. He was a binge drinker, you know? Completely drunk for three days straight, a week, a month, then he jumped back on the wagon again. Sober, he was a good man, a good father, so all the drinking had to be forgiven, enit?
“My father was Washington State High School Basketball Player of the Year in 1956. Even the white people knew how good that Indian boy played. He was just a little guy too, about five-foot-six and a hundred and fifty pounds, hair in a crewcut, and big old Indian ears sticking out. Walter Cronkite came out to the reservation and interviewed him. Cronkite stood on the free-throw line and shouted questions at my father, who dribbled from corner to corner and hit jumpshots.
“He was such a good basketball player that all the Spokanes wanted him to be more. When any Indian shows the slightest hint of talent in any direction, the rest of the tribe starts expecting Jesus. Sometimes they’ll stop a reservation hero in the middle of the street, look into his eyes, and ask him to change a can of sardines into a river of salmon.
“But my father lived up to those expectations, you know? Game after game, he defined himself. He wasn’t like some tired old sports hero, some little white kid, some Wonder-bread boy. Think about it. Take the basketball in your hands, fake left, fake right, look your defender in the eyes to let him know he won’t be stopping you. Take the ball to the rim, the hoop, the goal, the basket, that circle that meant everything in an Indian boy’s life.
“My father wasn’t any different. After his basketball days were over, he didn’t have much else. If he could’ve held a basketball in his arms when he cut down trees for the BIA, maybe my father would’ve kept that job. If he could have drank his own sweat after a basketball game and got drunk off the effort, maybe he would’ve stayed away from the real booze.”
Thomas opened his eyes and looked at his father, lying still on the kitchen table. A wake for a live man. Thomas tried to smile for the sisters. Checkers looked at the overweight Indian man on the table, saw the dirt under his fingernails, the clogged pores, the darkness around his eyes and at the elbows and knees.
“I would’ve never thought he played basketball,” Chess said.
“Me, neither,” Checkers said.
Thomas looked at his father again, studied him, and touched Samuel’s big belly.
“Did you ever play?” Chess asked.
“No,” Thomas said.
“Why not?”
“Well, even Moses only parted the Red Sea once. There are things you just can’t do twice.”
“Sometimes,” Checkers said, “I hate being Indian.”
“Ain’t that the true test?” Chess asked. “You ain’t really Indian unless there was some point in your life that you didn’t want to be.”
“Enit,” Thomas said.
“You know,” Chess said, “like when you’re walking downtown or something, and you see some drunk Indian passed out on the sidewalk.”
Thomas looked at his father.
“Oh,” Chess said. “I didn’t mean your father.”