I began "Little Indian" with the intention of describing the death of my grandfather, and moreover the weird way in which I remember having a premonition that he was going to die. The premonition involved a dream I related to my mom a few days before he died: something about seeing roses in a vase and thereby knowing that he was going to die on Valentine's Day, which he did. As I aged, the memory I always held onto regarding my grandfather's death was the ambiguity surrounding it. My mother said for years that he died of brain tumor, but eventually she admitted that this wasn't necessarily true. She wasn't sure what was wrong with him, perhaps Alzheimer's, but in the early 80s (he died in 1982) Alzheimer's was less understood than it is today. My grandfather did have something like a nervous breakdown in the 1950s, although he refused the suggested treatment (electro-shock) and so was never fully diagnosed. In any event, he had mental problems, and he did sometimes call me his "little Indian," so I had the title for the story before I had anything else.
    The other thing about my grandfather that always interested me was his relationship with my grandmother. She just died two months ago, at 98, and she never once mentioned my grandfather after his death. I can recall them arguing when I was little (they always screamed at each other in Sicilian, which embarrassed my mom but thrilled me and my sister), and I learned from my father that there had been infidelity, my grandfather apparently keeping a girlfriend in a town outside of Pueblo, Colorado, maybe Alamosa. In addition, when my grandmother had taken my grandfather to the hospital several months before he ended up dying, something happened in the parking lot and he (my grandfather) ended up running over my grandmother with their car. The accident broke my grandmother's hip and required extensive skin graphs, and for a time it looked like both my grandparents were going to die around the same time, and that one of them more or less tried to kill the other, although I didn't actually learn for many years that the car accident might have been intentional; as a little boy I was told that my grandfather's foot had slipped off the brake.
    So these were the ingredients with which I began "Little Indian": plot details involving my grandparents and, more ambiguously, the way in which, as a young boy, I was offered a certain official interpretation of events in my family while sensing that this interpretation was somehow insufficient. Right from the beginning the problem presented by the story that I found the most interesting was how narration might function when the narrator knows that what he knows isn't the full truth, so I was set on writing the story in the first person. But, as so often happens, when I started "Little Indian" the story went in directions I hadn't anticipated. The little boy began to talk about things I hadn't anticipated, and I learned that his parents were separated, unlike mine, and that he had a bed-wetting problem, which I never did. This was a story I really enjoyed writing because getting to know the narrator was interesting and kind of sweet. He's an "unreliable" narrator, I suppose, but since he's just a kid his unreliability doesn't evoke suspicion or distrust so much as pity, at least for me. Stylistically I was really interested in creating a narrative that was breathless, almost hyperactive, and it was only after I had the narrative voice figured out that it told me why it was so hyperactive: because it was fueled by nervousness caused by an intimidating father, an uncontrollable bladder, a world of older people that has curious, inscrutable stakes in its point of view, and etc. When I reflect on my childhood I'm always amazed by how frightened I was most of the time. When I turned seven my parents hired a clown named Binkie who came to the house and performed and for years after I had recurring nightmares, "Binkie dreams" I called them, in which the clown was chasing me around the dining room table or jumping out of closets. So I don't miss childhood, and when I think of the little lies we tell children it amazes me to reflect on both the perspicacity of children and the terrors that their imaginations can build on our "harmless" prevarications.
    So I still haven't written a story about my grandfather running over my grandmother with his green, 1976 LTD. Hopefully I'll get to it at some point.