“That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t just give away a thousand dollars.”
“We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.
“Hey,” I said to her. “Don’t go threatening people.”
The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking about the possibilities.
“Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said.”
He sounded sad about that. As if he was sorry for taking advantage of our disadvantages.
“What's your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.
“Jackson,” I said.
“Is that first or last?”
“Both,” I said.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, it's true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jackson. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family is funny.”
“All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a thousand dollars, would you?”
“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.
“That's too bad,” he said, and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar.
That would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”
“We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.
“That's too bad,” he said once more, and thought harder about the possibilities. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow with the money and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”
“It sounds all right,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here's twenty bucks.”
He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. And Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.
Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7- Eleven and bought three bottles of imagination. We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in only one day. Thinking hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off those bottles-one, two, and three.
Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke up. I heard later that she had hitchhiked back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.
Junior had passed out beside me and was covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else's vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him alone and walked down to the water. I love the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.
When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins, who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen North ever since.
These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back. “How long has your boat been gone?” I asked. “Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said. I cried with them for a while.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?” They didn’t.
I walked back to Junior. He was still out cold. I put my face down near his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was alive, so I dug around in his blue-jeans pockets and found half a cigarette. I smoked it all the way down and thought about my grandmother.
Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. My father always thought Agnes caught her tumors from the uranium mine on the reservation. But my mother said the disease started when Agnes was walking back from a powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She broke three ribs, and my mother always said those ribs never healed right, and tumors take over when you don’t heal right.
Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and the salt and the vomit, I wondered if my grandmother's cancer started when somebody stole her powwow regalia. Maybe the cancer started in her broken heart and then leaked out into her breasts. I know it's crazy, but I wondered whether I could bring my grandmother back to life if I bought back her regalia.
I needed money, big money, so I left Junior and walked over to the Real Change office.
Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, supports cultural projects that empower the poor and the homeless, and mobilizes the public around poverty issues. Real Change's mission is to organize, educate, and build alliances to create solutions to homelessness and poverty. It exists to provide a voice for poor people in our community. I memorized Real Change's mission statement because I sometimes sell the newspaper on the streets. But you have to stay sober to sell it, and I’m not always good at staying sober. Anybody can sell the paper. You buy each copy for thirty cents and sell it for a dollar, and you keep the profit.
“I need one thousand four hundred and thirty papers,” I said to the Big Boss.
“That's a strange number,” he said. “And that's a lot of papers.”
“I need them.”
The Big Boss pulled out his calculator and did the math.
“It will cost you four hundred and twenty-nine dollars for that many,” he said.
“If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t need to sell the papers.”
“What's going on, Jackson-to-the-Second-Power?” he asked. He is the only person who calls me that. He's a funny and kind man.
I told him about my grandmother's powwow regalia and how much money I needed in order to buy it back.
“We should call the police,” he said.
“I don’t want to do that,” I said. “It's a quest now. I need to win it back by myself.”
“I understand,” he said. “And, to be honest, I’d give you the papers to sell if I thought it would work. But the record for the most papers sold in one day by one vendor is only three hundred and two.”
“That would net me about two hundred bucks,” I said.
The Big Boss used his calculator. “Two hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents,” he said.
“That's not enough,” I said.
“And the most money anybody has made in one day is five hundred and twenty-five. And that's because somebody gave Old Blue five hundred-dollar bills for some dang reason. The average daily net is about thirty dollars.”
“This isn’t going to work.”
“No.”
“Can you lend me some money?”
