Reservation Blues - Alexie Sherman (8 page)

"You're not going to fall for this?"
Checkers asked her sister.

"Not completely," Chess said. "Maybe
just a little."

Thomas got carried away, though, and warbled his song
for Chess a few more times. He sang blues, country, and punk
versions, even recited it like a poem. Once, he closed his eyes and
told it like a story. The crowd went crazy and pushed Chess onstage
in their frenzy.

"Can you sing?" Thomas asked her.

"
Yeah," she said.

"
Let's do it, then," Thomas said.

The two launched into a duet. Chess felt like a
Flathead Reservation Cher next to the Spokane Indian version of
Sonny, but the music happened, clumsy and terrifying.

* * *

From The Western Montana Alternative Bi-Weekly:

Coyote Springs on Tipi, Crushes It Flat
A new band, dubbed Coyote Springs and hailing from
the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State,
took its first step toward musical oblivion the
other night
at the Tipi Pole Tavern on the
Flathead Reservation.

Playing a mix of blues, rock, pop, gospel,
rap, and a few
unidentifiable
musical forms,
the band made up in pure
volume what it
lacked in talent. In fact, Coyote Springs
seemed
to take the term rock literally and landed hard
on
all of our eardrums before rolling out the door to their
ugly
blue tour van, all headed for destinations unknown.
It
didn't help anything that two of the band members were
drunk
as skunks.

The highlight of the evening came when Chess
Warm Water,
a local Flathead Indian, was
pushed onto the stage for a
few duets with
Coyote Springs's lead singer, Thomas
Builds-the-Fire.
Warm Water has a voice exactly like her
surname,
which provided an interesting, if not altogether
beautiful,
contrast with Builds-the-Fire's sparkless vocals.

The dictionary defines unforgettable as
"incapable of being
forgotten," and
Coyote Springs, all considerations aside, was
certainly
that. Unforgettable and maybe even a little forgivable.

* * *

After the show at the Tipi Pole, Chess and Checkers
helped Coyote Springs pack away all their gear. Actually, Junior and
Victor passed out in the back of the van, so Chess and Checkers did
most of the work.

"So," Thomas said, "how long you two
lived out here?"

Long enough," Checkers said angrily, because she
wanted to go home.

"Don't pay her no mind," Chess said. "We've
lived here our whole lives."

"You're Flatheads, enit?" Thomas asked.

"
Yeah," Chess said. "And you guys are
all Spokanes?"

"Yeah," Thomas said and struggled to say
more.

Montana filled Thomas's mind. He used to think every
Indian in the world lived in Montana. Now he had played guitar in
Montana and sang duet with a beautiful Indian woman. Chess had never
considered herself beautiful, but she liked her face well enough. She
had broken her nose in a softball game in high school, which gave her
face strange angles, and it had never looked quite right since. She
didn't believe that shit about a broken nose adding character to a
face. Instead, her broken nose made her feel like her whole life
tilted a few degrees from center. She never minded all that much,
except that her glasses were continually slipping down her nose. She
spent half of her time readjusting them. Still, she had dark, dark
eyes that seemed even darker behind her glasses. They were Indian
grandmother eyes that stayed clear and focused for generations.

"
So," Thomas said again, "is Chess
your real name?"

"
No."

"What' s your real name?"

"
I ain't going to tell you," Chess said.
"You'd run off if you knew."

"
lt can't be that bad," Thomas said.

Checkers watched, surprised that Thomas chose her
sister. Checkers usually received all the attention, but she didn't
miss it this time. Thomas Builds-the-Fire looked especially goofy as
he stumbled his way through the first stages of courtship. They
finished all the packing, even pretended to pack Junior and Victor
into suitcases. The sisters stood with Thomas in the parking lot of
the Tipi Pole Tavern. A few stragglers shouted lewd suggestions at
Thomas, but he mostly ignored them.

"Well," Thomas said, "I hope to see
you again."

"Maybe you'll play here again," Chess said.

"
Maybe," Thomas said.

Checkers sent a telepathic message to her sister:
Invite him back to the house, you fool.
Y
ou've got him snagged.

"Listen," Chess said, "you want to
come back to our house? I've got you snagged, fool."

"You've got me what?" Thomas asked. He
didn't know what snag meant, although every other Indian on the
planet understood that particular piece of reservation vocabulary:
snag was noun and verb. A snag was a potential lover or the pursuit
of a lover. Snagged meant you"d caught your new lover.

"
I meant, " Chess corrected herself, "that
you must be all dragged out. Why don't you come back to the house?"

"What about them?" Thomas asked of Junior
and Victor.

"They can sleep in the van," Checkers said.

Thomas thought about the offer, but he felt a little
shy and knew that Victor and Junior might be pissed if they woke up
in the sisters' yard. Though they always pretended to be the toughest
Indian men in the world, they suffered terrible bouts of homesickness
as soon as they crossed the Spokane Indian Reservation border.

"I don't know," Thomas said. "We
should probably head back."

"Kind of crazy, enit?" Chess asked. "What
if you fall asleep driving?"

"
Well," Thomas said. "I'll stay for a
little while. Maybe drink some coffee. How does that sound?"

"
Sounds good enough."

Chess and Checkers jumped into the van with Thomas
and directed him to their little HUD house on the reservation. All
the lights burned brightly.

'"You live with your parents?" Thomas
asked.

"No," Chess and Checkers said.

"Oh. I was just wondering about the lights."

"We leave them on," Chess said. "Just
in case."

In case of what?
Thomas
asked in his mind but remained silent.

"Our parents are gone," Checkers said.

The trio walked into the house, left Victor and
Junior in the car, and sat down to coffee at the kitchen table.
Checkers emptied her cup quickly and said good night but left her
bedroom door open a little.

"
Your sister is nice," Thomas said.

"She's always crabby," Chess said, because
she knew that Checkers was eavesdropping.

"Oh, I didn't notice," Thomas lied.

"Tell me about yourself," Chess said,
because she couldn't think of anything else to say, because she
wanted to know.

"Not much to say," Thomas replied, feeling
shy. "What about you?"

"Well, we grew up on the reservation,"
Chess said.

"Way up in the hills in this little shack with
our mom and dad. Luke and Linda Warm Water."

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"
Thomas asked.

"Yeah, we had a baby brother, Bobby. We called
him Backgammon."

"What happened to him?" Thomas asked.

"You know," Chess said, "those winters
were always awful back then. Ain't no IHS doctor going to come
driving through the snowdrifts and ice to save some Indian kid who
was half dead anyway. I don't know. We feel less pain when we're
little, enit? Bobby was always a sick baby, born coughing in the
middle of a bad winter and died coughing in the middle of a worse
winter."

"I'm an only kid," Thomas said.

"Did you ever get lonely?" Chess asked.

"All the time."

"Yeah, you must have," Chess said. "I
get lonely when I think about the winters. I mean, it got so cold
sometimes that trees popped like gunshots. Really. All night long.
Pop, pop, pop. Kept us awake sometimes so we'd all play rummy by
candlelight. Mom, Dad, Checkers, me. Those were some good times. But
it makes me lonely to think about them."

Thomas and Chess sipped at their coffee.

"How about your parents?" Chess asked.

"My dad's still on our reservation, drinking and
staggering around," Thomas said. "But my mom died when I
was ten."

"
Yeah, my mom is dead, too."

"What about your dad?" Thomas asked.

"
He went to Catholic boarding school when he was
little," Chess said. "Those nuns taught him to play piano.
Ain't that funny? They'd teach him scales between beatings. But he
still loved to play and saved up enough money to buy a secondhand
piano in Missoula. Man, that thing was always out of tune.

"He used to play when it was too cold and noisy
to sleep. He'd play and Mom would sing. Old gospel hymns, mostly. Mom
had a beautiful voice, like a reservation diva or something. Mom
taught Checkers and me to sing before we could hardly talk. Bobby
slept in his crib by the stove. Those really were good times.

"What happened after Bobby died?" Thomas
asked, although he wanted to know more about her mother"s death,
too.

"You know, my dad never drank much before
Backgammon died. I mean, he always brought home some food, and Mom
always managed to make stews from whatever we had in the cupboards
and icebox. We didn't starve. No way. Checkers and I were just elbows
and collarbones, but we didn't starve.

"It was dark, really dark, when Backgammon died.
I don't know what time it was exactly. But all of us were awake and
pretending to be asleep. We just laid there and listened to
Backgammon struggle to breathe. His lungs were all filled up with
stuff. No. That's not true. It was just Mom, Checkers, and me who
listened. Dad had tied on his snowshoes a few hours earlier.

"I'm going for help," he said, and none of
us said a word to him. Mom helped him put his coat on and then she
kissed his fingers before he put on his gloves. Really. It's still so
vivid in my head. Mom kissed his fingertips, ten kisses, before he
tramped out the door into the dark.

"I don't know for sure how long we waited for
him. We weren't even sure he could make it back. He walked out in a
Montana snowstorm to find help. He wasn't even sure what kind of help
he was looking for. There weren't no white doctors around. There
weren't no Indian doctors at all yet. The traditional medicine women
all died years before. Dad just walked into the storm like he was
praying or something. I mean, even if he made it to other Indians`
houses, like the Abrahamson family or the Huberts, they couldn't have
done much anyway. The Abrahamson family had their own sick kids, and
the Huberts were an old Indian couple who didn't speak English and
only stayed alive to spite the BIA."

"Your father must have been scared," Thomas
said. He didn't know what to say to Chess.

"Yeah, he must have been really scared,"
Chess said. "But I don't know how far he walked or when he
decided to turn back. I always imagined he pounded on some stranger's
door, but there was no answer.

"
As he was walking back home, my mother held
onto Backgammon and sang to him. Checkers and I lay quietly in the
bed we shared. We heard Mom singing and the baby struggling to
breathe. I reached across the bed and set my hand on Checkers's chest
to make sure she was breathing. She reached across and did the same
on my chest. We felt the rise and fall, the rise and fall. We did
that until we heard Mom stop singing and the baby stop
breathing."

Tears welled in Chess°s eyes. She breathed deep and
looked at Thomas, who kept silent and waited for the rest of the
story. Then Chess excused herself and went to the bathroom, so Thomas
just sat at the table and looked around the small, clean house. The
kitchen sat in the center, while the living room, two bedrooms, and
bathroom surrounded it. Nothing spectacular, but spotless by
reservation standards. A clean, clean house.

"
Your sister left her light on," Thomas
said to Chess as she came back to the kitchen. "Is she still
awake?"

"She might be," Chess said. "But she
does sleep with her light on." just in case, Thomas thought.

"Jeez," Chess said as she sat down at the
table. "You're probably tired of me babbling, enit? You want
some more coffee?"

"
No, thanks. I'II be awake for weeks."

In her bed, Checkers listened to the conversation and
cried a little. She remembered Backgammon. After he died, their mom
held him against her chest and cried and cried. Checkers and Chess
refused to move from their bed. They knew nothing touched them when
they stayed still. Their mom cried even louder after their father
stormed back into the room, shouted and cursed like a defeated
warrior. He shouted until his wife raised Backgammon up to him like
an offering.