Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

“Are you Joseph, Sarah, and Jonah Lot?” asked the soldier. Tears were running down his face.

“Yes,” said my father.

“Joseph is full-blood Coeur d’Alene, Sarah is full-blood Spokane,” the black soldier said to a white soldier. “The Coeur d’Alene and Spokane are both Interior Salish tribes, so there should be no problem of contamination with the child.”

I heard the word contamination and cried out. I thought of disease, of deadly viruses floating invisibly through the air.

“Are there any other children?” asked the white soldier.

“No,” said the black soldier. “The child was supposed to be a twin, but the other baby was stillborn.”

My mother gasped. I wondered if her body had remembered the pain of my birth, and the greater pain of giving birth to my dead brother.

“What is this about?” asked my father. I could hear the fear in his voice. He tried to disguise it as anger. He turned his head to look at me. I could see the fear in his face. I’d never been more afraid of the fear in any man’s eyes.

“Quiet,” said a white soldier as he kicked my father in the ribs.

“Careful,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “Don’t draw blood.”

Contamination.

A white soldier suddenly pulled me to my feet and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were an impossible green.

“Don’t hurt my baby,” begged my mother.

“What was your brother’s name?”

“His name was Joseph,” I said. “Same as my dad.”

The white soldier nodded his head as if he’d known it all along.

“Leave him alone!” shouted my father as he tried to rise from the ground. A white soldier smashed him back down with the butt of his rifle. My father bled into the dirt.

“Damn it,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “I told you. No blood.”

Contamination.

The red glow poured from my father’s nose and mouth. My mother clawed at the dirt as if she thought she could escape by digging a tunnel.

“Jonah,” said the white soldier. “We don’t mean to hurt you. Or your parents.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “You’re going to eat us. You’re going to drink our blood.”

The white soldier’s face grew harder. Marble, granite, quartz.

“Jonah,” he said. “We’ve come to take you away from here. We need you.”

“I knew you were coming,” I said.

My father tried to breathe through his shattered nose and mouth. My mother pressed her face into the ground and wore it like a mask.

I bit deeply into my palm.

“I surrender,” I said to the white soldier as I offered my bloodied hand to him.

War is a church.

In my church, my mother and father were frozen in the stained-glass window above the altar. The red glass of my father’s bloody face was cradled by the blue glass of my mother’s dress.

Memory is a church on fire.

In my church, a soldier dropped a lighted match at the wooden feet of a crucified Jesus and watched the fire wrap around the savior like a shroud. Flames lifted away from Jesus’ body like angels and blessed the parched pews, threadbare curtains, and brittle hymnal books. Two rows of flames sang in the choir box. Flames climbed up the altar and walls to embrace my stained-glass parents.

The glass darkened with smoke.

The glass melted in the fire.

The glass exploded in the heat.

My parents’ faces fell to pieces in my mind only moments after those soldiers landed in our front yard. I began to forget pieces of my parents’ faces only moments after I was taken from them. By the time I was loaded into a school bus with twenty other kids from the reservation, I could remember only the dark of my mother’s eyes and the curve of my father’s jaw. By the time our bus crossed the border of the reservation, taking us away from what we had known and into what we could never have predicted, I had forgotten almost every piece of my parents’ faces. I touched my face, remembering that its features owed their shapes to the shapes of my parents’ faces, but I felt nothing familiar. I was strange and foreign.

Outside the bus, the landscape was familiar. With my parents, in our horse-drawn wagon, I had often traveled along that highway from the Spokane Indian Reservation into the city of Spokane. The blacktop road split the wheat fields into halves. On one side, irrigation equipment stepped like giant insects across the field. On the other side, a white farmer sat in a still tractor. He watched our bus slowly pass from left to right across his horizon. Farther along, a tribe of starlings perched in one pine tree. I raised my hand to wave a greeting to them and one thousand birds lifted simultaneously into flight. The grain silos were painted with the names of ghost towns. Those silos could have been the tombstones of giants. Red lights blinked at the tops of radio antenna towers. An orphaned stretch of barbed-wire fence was partially submerged in a roadside pond.

Suddenly, everything looked dangerous. Sharp stars ripped through the fabric of the morning sky. Morning dew boiled and cooked green leaves. Sun dogs snarled and snapped at one another. The vanishing point was the tip of a needle.

Inside the bus, a dozen soldiers stood in the aisle between the seats. Another soldier drove the bus. I counted them again and again. There were ten white soldiers, two black soldiers, and the soldier-who-looked-like-me. I sat a few seats behind the black soldier who was driving the bus. In the back, Arlene and Kim, the Cox twins, hugged each other and wailed. Farther forward, the five Juniors, four boys and one girl, pushed their faces against the windows. There were two boys named James — one who went by Jimmy and one who went by Jamie — and three Johns. Jimmy was the chess player and Jamie was dyslexic. The three Johns hated one another. Randy Peone, the green-eyed Spokane, was shouting curses in English and Salish, the languages of our tribe. A white soldier quickly pinned Randy to his seat, tied his arms behind his back, and covered his mouth with duct tape. There were three Kateris, all named after the Mohawk woman who was canonized when her smallpox scars disappeared. Two of the Kateris prayed quietly, while the third had long ago discarded her faith and was now trying to pry a spring loose from her seat to use as a weapon. Teddy, who had a white father, sat with his half-brother, Tyrone, who had a black father. Billy the Retard was smiling. I wondered if this new world was the world he’d been living in all along and if he was now happy that the rest of the Indian kids had finally joined him. Sam the Indian, who was really white, trembled in the seat across the aisle from me.

“Jonah, is it real?” asked Sam the Indian. He was a small boy, the subject of a thousand reservation schoolyard taunts, but none of that mattered in the bus. At that moment, as we all traveled together down the longest highway in tribal history, Sam the Indian was instantly loved and beloved by all of the Indians on that bus. Sam the Indian was a white child who loved Indians, who had come to live among us, and who had never been allowed to learn any of our secrets. As we Indians cowered in our seats, we all made silent apologies to Sam. We all said silent prayers for his safety because we had all, collectively and unconsciously, just decided that Sam’s pale skin contained some kind of magic. We thought the white soldiers would notice Sam’s white skin and call him brother. We thought they’d lift Sam to their shoulders in celebration, in some kind of strange and raucous ceremony, and carry him away while all of us Indian children made our escape. We all thought Sam could save us, but I was the only one who spoke to him.

“Help us,” I said to Sam.

Sam did not understand.

“Jonah,” he said. “Is this real?”