Blasphemy Read Online Free Page B

feel her breath on my ear, and she says, she says, she says, Good for you.
    “Can you believe that shit?” Mike asked. “I couldn’t even respond. But let me tell you this. If they ever let ex-cons vote, I’m going to vote for that governor. I’ll vote for her no matter what she’s running for. You see? I finally understand this damn country. I finally know who should lead us. It’s got to be somebody who is equal parts revenge and forgiveness. Somebody who is equal parts love and blood.
    “Do you know what I mean?” Mike asked. “Please tell me you know what I mean.”

THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD
    Being a Spokane Indian, I only pick up Indian hitchhikers.
    I learned this particular ceremony from my father, a Coeur d’Alene, who always stopped for those twentieth-century aboriginal nomads who refused to believe the salmon were gone. I don’t know what they believed in exactly, but they wore hope like a bright shirt.
    My father never taught me about hope. Instead, he continually told me that our salmon—our hope—would never come back, and though such lessons may seem cruel, I know enough to cover my heart in any crowd of white people.
    “They’ll kill you if they get the chance,” my father said. “Love you or hate you, white people will shoot you in the heart. Even after all these years, they’ll still smell the salmon on you, the dead salmon, and that will make white people dangerous.”
    All of us, Indian and white, are haunted by salmon.
    When I was a boy, I leaned over the edge of one dam or another—perhaps Long Lake or Little Falls or the great gray dragon known as the Grand Coulee—and watched the ghosts of the salmon rise from the water to the sky and become constellations.
    For most Indians, stars are nothing more than white tombstones scattered across a dark graveyard.
    But the Indian hitchhikers my father picked up refused to admit the existence of sky, let alone the possibility that salmon might be stars. They were common people who believed only in the thumb and the foot. My father envied those simple Indian hitchhikers. He wanted to change their minds about salmon; he wanted to break open their hearts and see the future in their blood. He loved them.
    In 1975 or ’76 or ’77, driving along one highway or another, my father would point out a hitchhiker standing beside the road a mile or two in the distance.
    “Indian,” he said if it was an Indian, and he was never wrong, though I could never tell if the distant figure was male or female, let alone Indian or not.
    If a distant figure happened to be white, my father would drive by without comment.
    That was how I learned to be silent in the presence of white people.
    The silence is not about hate or pain or fear. Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times. Perhaps a thousand white families are still waiting for their sons and daughters to return home, and can’t recognize them when they float back as morning fog.
    “We better stop,” my mother said from the passenger seat. She was one of those Spokane women who always wore a purple bandanna tied tightly around her head.
    These days, her bandanna is usually red. There are reasons, motives, traditions behind the choice of color, but my mother keeps them secret.
    “Make room,” my father said to my siblings and me as we sat on the floor in the cavernous passenger area of our blue van. We sat on carpet samples because my father had torn out the seats in a sober rage not long after he bought the van from a crazy white man.
    I have three brothers and three sisters now. Back then, I had four of each. I missed one of the funerals and cried myself sick during the other one.
    “Make room,” my father said again—he said everything twice—and only then did we scramble to make space for the Indian hitchhiker.
    Of course, it was easy enough to make room for one hitchhiker, but Indians usually travel in packs.