Sherman Alexie: The Toughest Indian in the World

In the cheap motel room, Mary Lynn breathed deeply. The Indian smelled of old sweat and a shirt worn twice before washing. She ran her finger along the ugly scars on his belly and chest. She wanted to know the scars’ creation story — she hoped this Indian man was a warrior with a history of knife fighting — but she feared he was only carrying the transplanted heart and lungs of another man. She pushed him onto the bed, onto the scratchy comforter. She’d once read that scientists had examined a hotel-room comforter and discovered four hundred and thirty-two different samples of sperm. God, she thought, those scientists obviously had too much time on their hands and, in the end, had failed to ask the most important questions: Who left the samples? Spouses, strangers? Were these exchanges of money, tenderness, disease? Was there love?

“This has to be quick,” she said to the stranger beside her.

Jeremiah, her husband, was already angry when Mary Lynn arrived thirty minutes late at the restaurant and he nearly lost all of his self-control when they were asked to wait for the next available table. He often raged at strangers, though he was incredibly patient and kind with their four children. Mary Lynn had seen that kind of rage in other white men when their wishes and desires were ignored. At ball games, in parking lots, and especially in airports, white men demanded to receive the privileges whose very existence they denied. White men could be so predictable, thought Mary Lynn. She thought: O, Jeremiah! O, season ticket holder! O, monthly parker! O, frequent flyer! She dreamed of him out there, sitting in the airplane with eighty-seven other white men wearing their second-best suits, all of them traveling toward small rooms in the Ramadas, Radissons, and sometimes the Hyatts, where they all separately watched the same pay-per-view porno that showed everything except penetration. What’s the point of porno without graphic penetration? Mary Lynn knew it only made these lonely men feel all that more lonely. And didn’t they deserve better, these white salesmen and middle managers, these twenty-first century Willie Lomans, who only wanted to be better men than their fathers had been? Of course, thought Mary Lynn, these sons definitely deserved better — they were smarter and more tender and generous than all previous generations of white American men — but they’d never receive their just rewards, and thus their anger was justified and banal.

“Calm down,” Mary Lynn said to her husband as he continued to rage at the restaurant hostess.

Mary Lynn said those two words to him more often in their marriage than any other combination of words.

“It could be twenty, thirty minutes,” said the hostess. “Maybe longer.”

“We’ll wait outside,” said Jeremiah. He breathed deeply, remembering some mantra that his therapist had taught him.

Mary Lynn’s mantra: I cheated on my husband, I cheated on my husband.

“We’ll call your name,” said the hostess, a white woman who was tired of men no matter what their color. “When.”

Their backs pressed against the brick wall, their feet crossed on the sidewalk, on a warm Seattle evening, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah smoked faux cigarettes filled with some foul-tasting, overwhelmingly organic herb substance. For years they had smoked unfiltered Camels, but had quit after all four of their parents had simultaneously suffered through at least one form of cancer. Mary Lynn had called them the Mormon Tabernacle Goddamn Cancer Choir, though none of them was Mormon and all of them were altos. With and without grace, they had all survived the radiation, chemotherapy, and in-hospital cable-television bingo games, with their bodies reasonably intact, only to resume their previously self-destructive habits. After so many nights spent in hospital corridors, waiting rooms, and armchairs, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah hated doctors, all doctors, even the ones on television, especially the ones on television. United in their obsessive hatred, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah resorted to taking vitamins, eating free-range chicken, and smoking cigarettes rolled together and marketed by six odoriferous white liberals in Northern California.

As they waited for a table, Mary Lynn and Jeremiah watched dozens of people arrive and get seated immediately.

“I bet they don’t have reservations,” he said.

“I hate these cigarettes,” she said.

“Why do you keep buying them?”

“Because the cashier at the health-food store is cute.”

“You’re shallow.”

“Like a mud puddle.”

Mary Lynn hated going out on weeknights. She hated driving into the city. She hated waiting for a table. Standing outside the downtown restaurant, desperate to hear their names, she decided to hate Jeremiah for a few seconds. Hate, hate, hate, she thought, and then she let her hate go. She wondered if she smelled like sex, like indigenous sex, and if a white man could recognize the scent of an enemy. She’d showered, but the water pressure had been weak and the soap bar too small.

“Let’s go someplace else,” she said.

“No. Five seconds after we leave, they’ll call our names.”

“But we won’t know they called our names.”

“But I’ll feel it.”

“It must be difficult to be psychic and insecure.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

Clad in leather jackets and black jeans, standing inches apart but never quite touching, both handsome to the point of distraction, smoking crappy cigarettes that appeared to be real cigarettes, they could have been the subjects of a Schultz photograph or a Runnette poem.

The title of the photograph: “Infidelity.”

The title of the poem: “More Infidelity.”

Jeremiah’s virtue was reasonably intact, though he’d recently been involved in a flirtatious near-affair with a coworker. At the crucial moment, when the last button was about to be unbuttoned, when consummation was just a fingertip away, Jeremiah had pushed his potential lover away and said I can’t, I just can’t, I love my marriage. He didn’t admit to love for his spouse, partner, wife. No, he confessed his love for marriage, for the blessed union, for the legal document, for the shared mortgage payments, and for their four children.

Mary Lynn wondered what would happen if she grew pregnant with the Lummi’s baby. Would this full-blood baby look more Indian than her half-blood sons and daughters?

“Don’t they know who I am?” she asked her husband as they waited outside the downtown restaurant. She wasn’t pregnant; there would be no paternity tests, no revealing of great secrets. His secret: he was still in love with a white woman from high school he hadn’t seen in decades. What Mary Lynn knew: he was truly in love with the idea of a white woman from a mythical high school, with a prom queen named If Only or a homecoming princess named My Life Could Have Been Different.

“I’m sure they know who you are,” he said. “That’s why we’re on the wait list. Otherwise, we’d be heading for McDonald’s or Denny’s.”

“Your kinds of places.”

“Dependable. The Big Mac you eat in Hong Kong or Des Moines tastes just like the Big Mac in Seattle.”

“Sounds like colonialism to me.”

“Colonialism ain’t all bad.”

“Put that on a bumper sticker.”

This place was called Tan Tan, though it would soon be trendy enough to go by a nickname: Tan’s. Maybe Tan’s would become T’s, and then T’s would be identified only by a slight turn of the head or a certain widening of the eyes. After that, the downhill slide in reputation would be inevitable, whether or not the culinary content and quality of the restaurant remained exactly the same or improved. As it was, Tan Tan was a pan-Asian restaurant whose ownership and chefs — head, sauce, and line — were white, though most of the wait staff appeared to be one form of Asian or another.