Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

Salmon Boy placed his left hand over his heart to protect it.

How much money do we have? Seymour asked again. He wanted to be sure.

Ten dollars.

Then we’re going to need more.

Yes, yes, we are.

Seymour leapt to his feet, stood on a table in McDonald’s.

Excuse me, shouted Seymour, but we are here to take your money, not all of it, but enough to continue, enough to keep moving south.

Seymour did not have the pistol, but he held his hand in the shape of a pistol. He clung tightly to the idea of a pistol.

Click, click, click on the empty chambers.

Seymour wanted to be kind and he wanted to be romantic. He wanted to be the Man Who Saved the Indian. He wanted to be the Coyote Nailed to a Fence Post. He wanted to be the Man Who Could Shoot Thirteen People.

He was a white man, and therefore he could dream.

Seymour ordered everybody to lie down on the floor. He ordered them to give up all the money they could spare. Salmon Boy stared down into his coffee cup. In that blackness, he saw the headlights of a fast car.

Please, please, give us your money, said Seymour. Just a dollar or two, he said.

The people in McDonald’s gave up their money like an offering. They filled the plate. They moved that much closer to God.

Hurry, hurry, Seymour shouted. The police are right behind us, they’re right behind us.

Salmon Boy stared down into his coffee cup and saw a blue man with a gun.

Oh, said Salmon Boy. He said, Oh, as he rose to his feet and stood on the table beside Seymour. They were men in love with the idea of being in love.

Please, he said. He said, Please.

Seymour took all the money his victims could spare, and then he took Salmon Boy’s hand, and they ran outside into all the south and southwest that remained in the world.

I DREAMED ABOUT THE WAR on the night before the war began, and though nobody officially called it a war until years later, I woke that next morning with the sure knowledge that the war, or whatever they wanted to call it, was about to begin and that I would be a soldier in a small shirt.

On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rainstorm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.

Those were the days before the first color televisions were smuggled onto the reservation, but after a man with blue eyes had dropped two symmetrical slices of the sun on Japan. All of it happened before a handsome Catholic was assassinated in Dallas, leaving a bright red mark on the tape measure of time, but after the men with blue eyes had carried dark-eyed children into the ovens and made them ash.

I was a dark-eyed Indian boy who leaned against pine trees and broke them in half. I was twelve years old and strong, with fluid skin that was the same color as Chimacum Creek in April, May, when the mud and water were indistinguishable from each other.

Those were the days of the old stories, and in many of those stories I was the Indian boy who was capable of anything.

In one of those stories, I lifted a grown man, Edgar Horse, draped him over my shoulder like an old quilt, and carried him for two miles from the gnarled pine tree in front of the tribal high school all the way down to the trading post in downtown Wellpinit. I carried Edgar, as many others had carried Edgar, because we were living in the days before Indians discovered wheelchairs and the idea of wheelchairs.

In another of those stories, I was the maker of songs. Widowed grandmothers gave me dollar bills and I invented songs about their long-dead husbands. Often, as I sang, the grandmothers would weep tears that I collected into tin cups and fed to the huckleberry bushes growing on the low hills of the reservation. All these years later, those huckleberries still taste like grief, and a cellar filled with preserved huckleberries is a graveyard stacked high with glass tombstones.

Because I was the maker of songs, young men gave me small gifts, a blank piece of linen paper, a stick of gum, an envelope decorated with a beautiful, canceled stamp, and in return I taught them love songs. I taught those young men the love songs that transformed scraps of newspaper into thin birds. In the middle of a city, in the middle of a strong wind, a thousand paper birds rattled and sang. I taught those young men the love songs that forced horses to bow their heads and kneel in the fields, the love songs that revealed the secrets of fire, the love songs that healed, the love songs that precipitated wars.

In another of those stories, in one of many stories about me, about the reservation where I was born, I was the small soldier who lived with his Spokane Indian mother and his Coeur d’Alene Indian father in a two-bedroom house in a valley near the Spokane River.

I slept alone in one bedroom while my parents shared the second. The living room was small, with just enough space for an end table, console radio, and tattered couch. The kitchen was the largest room in the house. We spent most of our waking hours there at the table that my father had carved from a fallen pine tree. My father had built almost every piece of furniture in the house, but he was not a good carpenter. The chairs rocked though they were not rocking chairs. We had to place one of my father’s old work shirts under one short leg of the dining table to prevent food from sliding into our laps. The radio and all of its bright and mysterious internal organs sat inside a series of homemade wooden boxes that had to be replaced every few months because of small electrical fires.

When those fires burned, my father would laugh and dance. He would pick up the flames with his bare hands and hold them close to his chest.

Indians will love anything if given the chance.

I loved our house. I cried whenever I left it. I never wanted to leave it. I wanted to grow old in that house. I wanted to become the crazy elder who’d lived in the same house for all of his life. When I died there, I wanted to have ninety years of stories hanging in the closets.

Beside the house, a pine tree bent its back like an old Indian woman walking in a strong wind. A forest of old women marched from horizon to horizon. Two crows, looking for rodents and songbirds, floated in the morning sky. A mile above the crows, clumsy airplanes left behind thick veins of smoke. Miles and miles above the airplanes, seven sibling planets kept track of our secrets.

On that morning and inside that house, I pulled back the covers of my dream of war and the covers of my bed, and stepped onto the cold, uneven floor. Our house leaned in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. I walked into the kitchen. The wind was blowing from east to west.

“Mother, there’s going to be a war,” I said to the woman with brown skin and black hair. She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. The coffee was thick with grounds. The blue china cup was chipped at its edges. She had purchased it, as is, at a secondhand store in the city of Spokane. My mother’s eyes were as dark as the eyes of a salmon who has just returned to the place where it was spawned.

“Jonah,” she said to me and laughed. My mother had named me after a man who’d survived a miracle. Because of that, she seemed to regard every action of mine, no matter how ordinary, as a miracle of its own. That morning, as I stepped into her kitchen, fresh from a dream of war, my mother pointed at the miracle of my fevered face and mussed hair. She set her cup on the table and took me into her arms. She said my name again and laughed, as if I had truly just emerged from the belly of a whale, and not from the belly of a dream where the enemy soldiers wore surgical gloves and white smocks.