06 February 2009
The Toughest Indian in the World
By Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. His first short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), received the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction. A story from the collection was adapted by Alexie for the award-winning film Smoke Signals. After his first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), was published, he was nominated as best young American novelist by Granta magazine. His prolific writing continues to win awards. He is also a stand-up comedian.
The following excerpts, from his short story collection The Toughest Indian in the World, give a flavor of his work. The first vignette is from the book’s title story.
In 1975 or ‘76 or ’77, driving along one highway or another, my father would point out a hitchhiker standing beside the road a mile or two in the distance.
“Indian,” he said if it was an Indian, and he was never wrong, though I could never tell if the distant figure was male or female, let alone Indian or not.
If a distant figure happened to be white, my father would drive by without comment.
That was how I learned to be silent in the presence of white people.
The silence is not about hate or pain or fear. Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times. Perhaps a thousand white families are still waiting for their sons and daughters to return home, and can’t recognize them when they float back as morning fog.
“We better stop,” my mother said from the passenger seat. She was one of those Spokane women who always wore a purple bandanna tied tightly around her head.
These days, her bandanna is usually red. There are reasons, motives, traditions behind the choice of color, but my mother keeps them secret.
“Make room,” my father said to my siblings and me as we sat on the floor in the cavernous passenger area of our blue van. We sat on carpet samples because my father had torn out the seats in a sober rage not long after he bought the van from a crazy white man.
I have three brothers and three sisters now. Back then, I had four of each. I missed one of the funerals and cried myself sick during the other one.
“Make room,” my father said again – he said everything twice—and only then did we scramble to make space for the Indian hitchhiker.
Of course, it was easy enough to make room for one hitchhiker, but Indians usually travel in packs. Once or twice, we picked up entire all-Indian basketball teams, along with their coaches, girlfriends, and cousins. Fifteen, twenty Indian strangers squeezed into the back of a blue van with nine wide-eyed Indian kids.
Back in those days, I loved the smell of Indians, and of Indian hitchhikers in particular. They were usually in some stage of drunkenness, often in need of soap and a towel, and always ready to sing.
Oh, the songs! Indian blues bellowed at the highest volumes. We called them “49s,” those cross-cultural songs that combined Indian lyrics to every Hank Williams song ever recorded. Hank was our Jesus, Patsy Cline was our Virgin Mary, and Freddy Fender, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, Tanya Tucker, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, Donna Fargo, and Charlie Rich were our disciples.
We all know that nostalgia is dangerous, but I remember those days with a clear conscience. Of course, we live in different days now, and there aren’t as many Indian hitchhikers as there used to be.
In “One Good Man” the narrator reviews his life as he cares for his diabetic amputee father, who has returned from the hospital to die. Through the story, he repeatedly asks himself, and the reader, “What is an Indian?” posing different answers each time. ‘‘What is an Indian? Is it a child who can stroll unannounced through the doors of seventeen different houses?” or “What is an Indian? Is it a son who can stand in a doorway and watch his father sleep?” After his father tells him about a dream, he decides to take his father on a trip to Mexico. This is the final vignette of the story.
South of Tecate, California, the van broke down. Then, five minutes later, north of Tecate, Mexico, my father’s wheelchair broke down.
We stood (I was the only one standing!) on the hot pavement in the bright sun.
“We almost made it,” said my father.
“Somebody will pick us up,” I said.
“Would you pick us up?”
“Two brown guys, one in a wheelchair? I think the immigration cops might be picking us up.”
“Well, then, maybe they’ll think we’re illegal aliens and deport us.”
“That would be a hell of an ironic way to get into Mexico.”
I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he’d ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up this dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked my father.
“God has lots of potential,” he said.
“When you pray,” I asked him. “What do you pray about?”
“That’s none of your business,” he said.
We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across the border.
Copyright ©2000 by Sherman Alexie. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
