This is a short story I worked out a couple of years ago...
"Hey, man, you oughtta know better than to give a credit card to an Indi'n," Matt Cultus said. He popped a can of Budweiser.
His eyes were bloodshot and he smelled like beer. Even above the old fish and mildew smell of the camp, I could smell him.
"I mean, you know what rez cars are like—I went to buy them tires and they told me I needed brakes and an alignment...shit, you know how much an alignment costs on a four-by-four like my Chevy? Nah, honkies just sign checks, man, you never look at a bill an' wonder where you're gonna find the bucks to pay for something like that."
I watched James: he had loaned his credit card to Matt Cultus. Matt put something like eleven hundred dollars on it, and not all of that was car repair. Matt Cultus's asshole-nature transcended any racial solidarity I might have felt toward him. Some people are assholes regardless of race. I'm a quarter-blood Salish, but Cultus was hammering on the other three-quarters of me, too.
"...Way I figure it, white people got more than enough; when us Indians have anything, we share with each other. All the wannabe Indi'ns come to us for spiritual help. Well, suyapos ain't got much we really can use, 'cept money— and we wouldn't need that if it wasn't for the honkies in the first place."
James stood there for a few seconds. I watched and wondered. Cultus had maybe sixty pounds on James: He was built like a line-backer. His forearms were the size of my calves.
James grinned, though. He raised his hands and applauded. "Pretty good, man, pretty good. I was a dope fiend for twenty years, and I've seen some good cons. Used this very one, myself, more than once; I guess this is my payback. Here's how it works: you decide you got a right to blow off an obligation and then you pick a fight to cinch it down. Have a fight, then other guy's some sort of motherfucker, and you don't have no more obligation. If I had a hat on, I'd tip it off to you."
Cultus had a blank look on his face. He drained the can and looked at the label, and then crunched the can in his fist. He looked as dark as a bad dream. James chuckled. He held out his hand to shake.
"You got me, bro. How you're going to work this out with The Creator is beyond me. I'm just glad I don't have to be involved. Good luck."
Cultus hesitated and then shook it; I held out mine and he shook it, too. I followed James back to his truck. I heard the clatter of the empty can hitting the ground just behind us. We climbed into the truck and left the fish camp.
About a mile down the highway, I said, "Noticed you didn't ask him for the credit card."
"Well, yeah. When I got the statement yesterday, I paid it and then cancelled the card.... Poor Matt: his father had a stroke in jail, after the cops arrested him trying to keep them from logging up there where they used to do vision quests; his uncle drowned in the river catching salmon, a cousin killed himself after he was convicted of shooting eagles and then selling their feathers. Hard luck family, man. Can't say Matt does a lot to change that kind of karma."
We stopped by Mom's house. We had a load of wood for her. She was my foster mom, really, twenty years ago, but she's the only one I remember. She's Indian; I'm not, officially—I haven't got a pedigree, but if you look at my hair and my eyes you can see it. We stacked the firewood in the shed and then went in for a cup of coffee. James told her about the credit card.
Mom shook her head. She didn't make tsk-tsk noises, but she did the head-shaking and the rest of it. "That Matt. Paul, did you tell James about the time he raped Myrna, my niece?"
"Myrna?" I was surprised. I'd never heard a word about it. Another one of Mom's bombshells: she's good at dropping them. Has something to do with maintaining a power-base, I think.
Myrna is a big woman, almost six feet tall. Her mother—Aunt Rachel—is Sioux and her father was Russian. She's pretty, but retarded—some sort of brain damage when she was about twelve. I knew that a lot of guys had got into her pants; at sixteen she'd had a baby. The child had been shipped off to live with family on the rez in Montana where Mom and Aunt Rachel are from. The two women had conned the doctors into sterilizing Myrna. Probably the doctors were Indian Health Service: some of them didn't have many qualms about sterilizing Indian women.
Myrna was still around the community, but under Rachel's thumb. Rachel treated her like a servant.
Rachel and Mom were two incredibly strong, if sideways-acting, women. On the other hand, I pretty much think it was the right thing to do, probably—sterilizing Myrna, I mean.
"Matt Cultus tried to rape her? Jesus Christ."
Mom nodded smugly. Like, well, you people think you're so smart, I'm showing you I know more. "Oh, if Uncle Alvin was still alive when that happened, you'd have seen an Assinniboine-Yakima war like you wouldn't believe."
Uncle Alvin would be alive today if he hadn't died of liver failure after a million or so jugs of screw top wine. Chronic alcoholism has its good points.
Shouldn't say that, I guess: think well of the ancestors that have gone over—you're supposed to honor and bless them, no matter what kind of lives they led. For me that's bullshit. Sometimes Alvin had been OK, but usually he was an asshole. I always wondered if he hadn't diddled Myrna and his other daughters. Some women, Myrna's age—my foster sisters' ages—had complained about Alvin's feeling them up and stuff. Nobody did anything about it, of course. Girls were responsible for men's actions.
I asked if Rachel had prosecuted Cultus.
"Oh, we tried, but you know those white people don't care about Indians. They wanted us to do all the work and make poor Myrna get up there and talk about it in front of everybody. That Matt Cultus family, you know he has an auntie on the tribal court over at Speelyai, and how famous his family is...
"He used to come around and sweat sometimes, then go off and do something stupid. You know he tried to attack your sister, Kia Washtè Win, one time. Thought she was just some foolish little white girl. She hit him—" Her voice dropped like it was a big secret, "Right in the testicles! Just as hard as she could. And she screamed. He doubled over and fell off the front porch. I think that was the last time he came around here!"
Mom had a happy gleam in her eyes, remembering it. I'll say this about Mom: she has a sense of family that almost transcends race. Almost—Kia was also a quarter-blood or something like that. She looked white. I'm like that. She took us in if we were friends of her own kids. There was—and is—always a place to stay and food to eat. She railed and still rails against white people—wasichus, but we were somehow a bit different; she always had white people doing things for her, like James bringing firewood, but maybe she really believed on some level Kia and me were real Indians. Maybe not—she manipulated us, too. An Equal Manipulation Mother. She didn't treat any of us kids different. She'd even married a couple of white men, as well as a pair of Indians, so her birth-kids ranged from full blood to half-breed.
If I had kids, she'd want them to call her Grandma, and she'd call them her grandkids, I know that....
Anyhow, she was my foster mom, but she was more a mom than any of the others I had, and a hell of a lot more than my birth-mother. Go figure.
I didn't see or hear about Matt Cultus for a long time; then when of the Indian papers had a picture of him getting arrested over at Tomahawk Island, after building a fishing platform over the river and netting salmon out of season. "Indians arrested for fishing in treaty-promised locations," the caption said. I followed the paper for several months and didn't see any mention of the prosecution of the case. I asked Mom: she said she'd heard he'd gone down to some protest at the atomic test site in Nevada and was still down there, playing fugitive. "Probably trying to talk his way into the sleeping bag of some white woman. But you know, Paul, the cause is a good cause. Its about healing The Mother Earth."
"Is it because his dad was such an activist? He's trying to make his own name?" The question I didn't ask was this: Or is he getting a lot of wasichu ass?
"I think so. His father was a very good man. Of course, you know, his father had children all over the place, like Indian men do. 'Specially medicine men. They're different. People tell me old Arnold Cultus could talk the fish right into his nets. Matt just wanted his father to love him, I suppose. Its too bad he couldn't figure out a better way to do it, besides always getting in trouble, and thinking about women. He definitely has the elk medicine."
That happened last May. Toward the end of June, Mom called and asked if I'd help her write some manifesto about Indian rights and legal cases; she was going to give a presentation over in Olympia on indigenous rights. She read it to me and then listed the co-signers. Matt Cultus's name was on it.
"He back on the scene?"
"Well, Paul, you know that Cultus name is pretty famous. Did you know he was arrested down at the Nevada Test Site? And he's been arrested three times down in California for dip-netting salmon? He's become real famous for Indian people."
"Are we talking about the guy who raped your niece and came on to Kia Washtè Win?"
Her voice dropped a notch. "Paul, you know Tunkashila—Grandfather—doesn't want us to carry grudges. Besides, Myrna was leading him on. And I wouldn't be surprised if your sister did too."
There wasn't much to say to that. It was true about Tunkashila. Its also true that Mom held grudges like an eagle holds a fish. And that she always blames women when they got mixed up with men.
I told her to fax the manifesto to me and I'd fix it up and return it. No use arguing: I just hoped I wouldn't run into him. I hadn't for a long time. Better not to put too much thought into him.
But, its such a pisser when you know somebody's a no-good asshole and everybody's pretending he isn't. Especially when it's for political aims. I used to think it was just white folks who did that: now I know its everybody—white black yellow red brown—probably even space aliens. Everybody plays that game.