Free The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson Page A

cigarette. She lit it and turned her head to blow little puffs of smoke to one side. “Bunch of white people celebrating themselves. No thanks.”
    He didn’t think he was celebrating anything. He couldn’t remember ever having much patriotic feeling, even before the war beat it out of his backside. They wouldn’t understand that. They thought anybody with blond hair and blue eyes had no reason for complaints. Not wanting to give up his argument entirely, he said, “Some of that stuff is kind of interesting. The whatsis. Tall ships. Fireworks.”
    “Well you head on down there if you want. It’s a party I’m not invited to.”
    Deb was Yakama and Quinault and Umatilla and some other odds and ends of tribes that didn’t exist anymore and probably a little whitey thrown in there too, though nobody liked to talk about that. She even had a white name, Potter, which was regarded as another injustice. She’d grown up on the rez. Ray had heard enough about it by now. The white devils. How they had—OK we had—grabbed their land, killed off all the salmon, elk, beaver, resettled the tribes on the most crapped-out acreage around, and then told them to be farmers. Ray didn’t feel personally responsible for any of that, but he guessed this was where the notion of tribe came in. How they/we had turned their history into a bunch of stupid movies. VictorMature all oiled up, wearing a cheap, woolly-looking wig with braids and a feather.
    It was one of Vietnam’s bad jokes, one he didn’t think Deb would appreciate, that hostile territory was called Indian country.
    Sometimes he thought she liked his being white just so she could hold on to her grudges.
    On the rez there was poverty, etc. Alcoholism, diabetes, hypertension, everything that came of eating the white man’s food, following the white man’s ways. The house Deb grew up in had neither running water nor electricity and sure, that was rough, but part of him wondered why it was so much worse than living in tipis or lodges or whatever they’d had a thousand years before there was an America. Of course the problem was more complicated. It was a soul-sickness having to do with shame, scorn, and the humiliation of having lost a war and yes, he knew something about all that.
    When were you a tribe and when weren’t you? Did Norwegian count? His Indian name: Ray White Rat, Junior.
    “Hey,” he said quickly, since the other two were stirring, ready to get up from the table. “I got a little surprise.”
    They looked at him without curiosity. He wasn’t famous for his surprises. Elton said, “I’m going back over to Craig’s.”
    “It won’t take but a minute.” Ray got up and went into the bedroom, his and Deb’s room, navigating through the landscape of piled-up clothes and burdened chairs, finding his knapsack on the floor of the closet. “OK, outside.”
    They didn’t want to go outside. What was the deal, anyway? They complained and dragged ass. It was barely dark by now. This far north was practically the land of the midnight sun. Not really dark enough but it was going to have to do, since they wouldn’t let him wait and do anything right. Deb and Elton straggled out. “Now don’t look,” he instructed them. They weren’t looking. Big whoop.
    The yard was long and narrow, with unimpressive wire fencing separating them from the neighbors on three sides. Somebody who’d lived here before had constructed a porch on the back end of the house,a homemade thing roofed in corrugated white plastic and supported on a pair of three-by-five posts. Deb and Elton loitered here, bored and ready to go back inside.
    “One second,” he told them, hustling down to the far end of the yard, past the puny garden. Wishing he’d managed to smoke a little marahoochie. Half a joint still in his shirt pocket. Deb not approving of it in general, and especially not around Elton. Like the kid was some drug virgin. Please.
    “One more . . . second,” he called back to