Father and Farther

Father and Farther

Such waltzing was not easy
----Theodore Roethke

1.

In McNeil Island Prison for bad checks, my father worked to pay
back his debts. One morning, a few weeks before his scheduled
release date, he climbed the power tower for some routine line
repair and touched a live wire. Unconscious and burned, he fell
five feet before his safety line snapped taunt.

2.

My father knows how to jitterbug.
How many Indians can say that?

3.

He attended Catholic school on purpose. There, the nuns taught
him how to play piano. He refuses to play now, and offers no
explanations for his refusal. There is a photograph of my father
and his sister sitting side by side at a piano. She is wearing a
silk dress. He is wearing a coat and tie. Did she know how to play
the piano? I assume she could. She attended the same Catholic
school as my father. She died in 1980. My father stood beside
her coffin and did not sing.

4.

Late night, Yakama Indian Reservation, my father drunk, telling
stories. We had traveled there to play in an all Indian basketball
tournament. My father was the coach. I was the shooting guard. We
had a bad team and were eliminated quickly. We camped in a cheap
hotel. Four players to a room, though my father and I were alone
for some reason. "Listen," my father said,"I was a paratrooper in
the war." "Which war?" I asked. "All of them," he said.

5.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he believes it heals everything.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he watched RFK's last news conference.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he has a tickle in the back of his throat.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he has survived twenty-three car wrecks.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he wants to stop the influenza virus at the door.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he once saw Lana Turner in a parade.

My father drinks cough syrup
because he is afraid of medicine.

6.

Of course, by now, you realize this is a poem about my father. It
could also be a series of exaggerations and outright lies. I might
be talking about another man who wears my father's mask. Behind
the mask, he could be anybody.

7.

Summer evening, 1976. Our father is thirsty. He knows his children
are thirsty. He rummages through our house in search of loose
change. He finds a handful of coins. He walks to the Spokane
Tribal Jail which, for some unknown reason, has the only soda
pop machine on the reservation. My father has enough change for
six Pepsis. It is quiet. We can hear mosquitos slamming through
the screen door. The jail is only a few hundred feet from our
house. If we listen closely, we can hear our father dropping
change in the machine. We can hear the sodas drop into the
dispenser. My father gathers the cans. He carries them back
to us.

8.

Basketball is
a series of prayers.

Shoot the ball
and tell me

you believe
otherwise.

My father
shoots the ball.

As it spins away
my father prays.

9.

My father often climbed into a van with our crazy cousins
and left us for days to drink. When he came back, still drunk,
he always popped "Deer Hunter" into the VCR. He never made it
past the wedding scene. I kept watching it after he'd passed
out. Halfway through the movie, John Savage and Robert De Niro
play a sick game of Russian Roulette while their Vietcong
captors make wagers on the probable survivor. De Niro asks for
more bullets. Two bullets, three. He knows the odds. He holds
the gun to his head. He has a plan.

10.

As he dribbles
past you, into the
paint, then stops, pivots
and gives the big man
a head fake, you must
remember that my
father can shoot with either
the right or left hand.

11.

During the World's Fair in 1974, my father and I rode over
Spokane Falls in a blue gondola. No, it was more like a chair.
Our legs and feet floated free. I looked down into the water.
My father held his left arm around me. He must have been afraid
of gravity. Then my left shoe came loose because the laces were
not tight enough. My shoe would have slipped from my foot if I
hadn't pressed my other shoe against it. My father told me to
hang on. He was smiling as I struggled to keep my shoe. I had
written my name across the top of it. I looked down into the
water. My father was laughing. The chair was blue. It was 1974.
The entire world was walking the streets below us. My mother
was dancing for tourists in the North American exhibit. My
siblings were sleeping in the station wagon. Gravity. The
water. My shoe. I looked at my father. He held me tightly.
He told me to hold on.


Sherman Alexie............from The Summer of Black Widows