Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

letting her temper fly. I don’t remember ever seeing
that happen in my thirty years, but then, there are a
lot of things from that time I don’t remember.
I forget to ask my question.
My father’s gurney is rolling down the hall. His
thick glasses lie on the bedside table. He can barely
see without them. Glaucoma. There is no choice but
this last-ditch operation. The leather bag is a hard
lump in my pocket. I touch it gently with my
fingertips. Can’t believe I let him hold it, open it;
can’t believe I’m even in this hospital as his next of
kin. I used to hate this man; feared him so much that
I couldn’t eat, couldn’t stand to be in the same room
with him. His demons contaminated all of his
children, but especially my brother, his last child, ten
years younger than me.
I raised Little Al until he was six. We had each
other on those crazy nights, Al’s hand like a paw in
mine as we listened together to the sound of that old
red pickup truck barreling down the dirt road away
from us again. Though I was not allowed to interfere
when our father pulled off his belt to discipline, I
snuck into Little Al’s room afterwards as he cried
what we both knew had to be perfectly silent tears.
In the long summers while I was home all day, we