The Cutthroat Diaries

DELICIOUS

He loves how cold she always is, even sandwiched

in their matched, fully-zipped-together sleeping bags

she presses herself to his back, chilled tomato to the ham of him.

It’s August, but the river runs an arm’s length below them,

runs her height from them southwest, and it is cold, cold

as she is always cold, though here is where she loves to sleep,

inside the almost-kiss of it, the river’s endless consumption

of stones, its long nightly respirations risen into veils,

into steam tatters a morning sun unwinds and licks away.

This is how it must be: her front sufficiently warmed, she turns

and he must also turn, the spoon of meat he is all night, and hot,

a film of almost-sweat across him like a condiment

she cannot get enough of: he is rich, he thinks, he is taste

and succulence, he is delicious.  And if one bench of floodplain

farther up and away from where they lie would be warmer,

still he knows it would be too far for her from what she loves

as much as she loves his hands and chest, his salt skin shoulders

and his breath: this river she cannot in her life live without

for long.  He does not mind such faithlessness as that.

She would be the trout she loves as much as she loves him,

so therefore he lives alongside the water breathing with her also,

and when the sun at last clears the eastern ridge

and the dew from the tent’s dome, like the river’s mists,

is swallowed by the air, he also like the mist rises,

pared away from her, and builds her

a small morning fire, and fires the water for coffee,

and is allowed, as the most modest recompense, to stand

and watch through the sliver of vent at the top of the tent door

as she rises too, bare and half warm, to dress again

for the day—the chilled breasts and backside

submerged inside her clothes as the trout is

in the river—for though he also loves the trout

and will be all the sun long troubled

by the difficulty of the lure, the fly, the hook that holds

inside what appetite any of them might imagine,

still he knows, come night, come the water’s icy vapors

upward, that he will hold her as he might, lucky under the moon

and near the trout—its beautiful meat and bone, its edible skin—

where they sleep, on the round of the river’s cold lip.

                                                                       Robert Wrigley

While waiting for dry-fly season to open, a contemplation on basketball and my father, whom I miss this time of year most of all…

            Everyone in my family, including my father, mother, brother, aunt, and uncles, played basketball in high school—everyone except me.

            It wasn’t that I didn’t have the interest or the potential, but there was this: by the time I was old enough to dribble, my parents had become deeply involved in a sect of Pentecostal fundamentalism called Pilgrim Holiness, a religion that teaches separation from the world and that women, as the daughters of Eve, represent the ruin of all mankind. The only remedy for the temptation we represented was that we keep ourselves silent and invisible. I came of age wearing the calf-length cotton skirts, high necklines, and long sleeves that bespoke modesty—a dress code strictly enforced by my devout father.

            Which is why the pride I felt in making the girls junior high team turned to disappointment when I brought the news home. The trunks and numbered jersey were immodest, my father said. I wouldn’t be allowed to wear the uniform, and without the uniform, I knew I could never be a part of the team.

            My father died four years ago, but, recently, when I asked my mother about this memory, she told me she couldn’t recall the incident and wondered that my father would deny me the chance to play the sport he so loved. “I remember he wouldn’t let you join the drill team or cheerleading squad because of the short skirts, but I’m surprised about basketball,” she said. Thinking back on it now, so am I.  Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Lew Alcinder/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jerry West, Coach John Wooden—their names are mythic to me, men larger than life, and I’ve always felt a kind of love for them, maybe because they brought my stoic father to shouts of real joy. “That’s just so pretty,” he would say in his slowOklahoma drawl, meaning the perfect arc, the nothing-but-net whisper of the ball through the hoop.

            I can’t help but wonder how different my young life might have been if I had been allowed to find my identity in sports rather than with the desperate clutch of teenagers who, like me, were ridiculed and exiled because they were different: kids from the children’s home, kids who never saw their parents sober, kids who never saw their parents at all. Instead of practicing shooting hoops after school, I followed my new friends to the banks of the river, where I learned to smoke and drink fortified wine that we stole from the bums and to lie to my father about where I had been. My father’s restrictions became even tighter, his punishment more severe. Instead of traveling with my team to regional tournaments, I ran away from home, was found, and dragged back. High school brought with it a few years of relative calm until a final confrontation with my father the night of high school graduation, when I left home for good.

            It took many years for the rift between my father and me to heal—and many, many hours of watching basketball on TV, the choreographed conflict on the screen displacing the personal battle of wills we were trying to let go of, the announcer’s excited voice filling the tense silence between us.

            Slowly, miraculously, our anger mellowed to a shared sense of gratitude that we each had survived the other. And even though we sometimes exchanged memories of my younger brother’s time as a high school forward, my father and I never talked about how I had made the girls team but never played a single game.

            The frenzy of the March tournaments without my father’s commentary, his almost-always-right judgment of bad calls and coaching flaws, feels less mad than melancholy. I wish that he had lived long enough to see me forty years past my seventh grade disappointment, standing on the sidelines, shouting encouragement as “my team” posted up-and-under beneath the basket. I think he would have been proud to discover that the love of basketball I inherited from him is still strong—even if it has taken a new and unexpected turn.

            Here is how it happened: As a professor of creative writing at theUniversity ofIdaho, I teach a year-long graduate novel workshop, and I’m always looking for ways to bring in published authors to meet with my students for little more than a beer and bed. This past fall, when National Book Award finalist Jess Walter generously agreed to visit the workshop, two of his friends, writers Sam Ligon and Shann Ray Ferch, offered to join in. I knew that Shann, a top college player out ofMontana who went pro overseas, regularly and seriously hit the hardwood with Jess. I proposed a game of three-on-three, provided I could hustle up a few willing English faculty and graduate students.

            “Why don’t I see if Sherman Alexie wants to join in?” Jess offered. It had been a few years since I’d seenSherman, but his love of watching and playing basketball is itself the stuff of legend. When he agreed and told us he would be bringing two of his friends, both veteran ballers, I realized I had a real game on my hands. Furious recruitment on my part brought out the latent hoopster in so many middle-age scholars that my roster tripled, and our little game of pickup was fast becoming a Big Event. Proceeds would go toward establishing the American Indian Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing—the first of its kind in the nation.

            It was all very exciting, and the sudden demands of organizing and promoting a full-court game proved nearly overwhelming (“Damn it, Jess! I’m a writer, not a basketball manager!), but what really took me by surprise was how much fun I was having, especially when it came to the smattering of (relatively mild) smack talk, which was its own kind of playful competition:

            Dear Jess, Shann, Sherman, & Team:

            It looks like we’re going to get Memorial Gym for the event, which means you have to shag your friends and family down to fill the bleachers because who else will come to watch you play? Also, just fyi and fys (survival), we will have student athletic trainers at   the game, who can practice their amateur skills on you as needed.

            Kim

            ***

            Dear Kim:

            Which of your professors is most likely to tear his ACL?

            Sherman

            Finally, it was an eclectic mix of noon-ball wannabes, former college stand-outs, aging academics, representatives of seven different tribes, and a single high school point guard who lined the benches as hundreds of people streamed into the gym. It was a successful kick-off for an important cause—and more fun than I had had in a long time. I hadn’t thought too much about how natural it had felt to work with the teams, throw around a bit of roundball jargon, tease and be teased, and I was surprised when a reporter asked me, “How did you become so interested in basketball? Did you play?”

            “No,” I said, “but everyone else in my family did…” and then to myself, but I so badly wanted to.

            That time when I might have run the court without tearing a tendon has passed, but my memories of my father only deepen. March Madness comes near the anniversary of his death, and as I watch the teams square off, I find myself mourning his absence even as I work to let go of my grief over all that might have been. Life is a kind of game, after all, and we sometimes play with injury.

            I think of Sherman’s parting email as he, Jess, and the rest of their team took the trophy and headed out of town. “My knee is swollen and creaking,” he wrote, “but I am happy,” and I realized that “happy” was exactly what I was feeling too, having played the game the only way I could.

“You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live. That’s what I’ve discovered about writing. The world doesn’t want you to do a damn thing. If you wait till you got time to write a novel or time to write a story or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read — if you wait for the time, you’ll never do it. Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.” — Harry Crews

Yet another thing that writing and fishing have in common.

What do you do when you’ve gotten into a Big Fish and lost it, then thrown down your beloved rod in frustration and almost lost that too, then waded to the bank in mounting anger only to sit down on—and break—your net? You walk downriver to commiserate with your big sis and her husband, who then give you the sweet spot, into which you cast with some humiliation and a load of doubt, only to hook another Big One. But your net, alas!, is gone, and the cutthroat has found the current… And so you do what little brothers have done since the beginning of time: you call on your big sister for help. She lays down her own rod, wades to your side, and even though her net is still attached to the back of her vest, she leans in close, and you work together as though twinned. When you finally land the fish, you are both so happy, and you know that this is a story that will last longer than the story of the One That Got Away. Brother, we are blessed.