Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

Fire.

I tried not to breathe, because I knew I would be inhaling the ash those sickly Indians had become. We were then forced into red jumpsuits and marched across a brightly lit tarmac into the belly of a plane. There were a thousand Indians inside that plane. I counted them, the sound of their screams and whimpers, the sound of their curses and whispers. We were made to crouch as the plane lifted up into the sky. That was the first time I had ever consciously thought about flight. I realized I had never flown before and laughed hysterically. A large hand reached out and touched my shoulder. It was too dark to see. That hand could have been my mother’s or my father’s. It had to be somebody’s mother or father.

“Hush, hush,” said a voice.

I moved away from that hand. I crawled through the dark, searching for something familiar. I smacked my face into another face.

“Billy,” said the other face. I recognized it instantly, recognized the familiar lilt and upward inflections of my fellow tribal member.

“Billy,” I repeated.

“Billy,” he said again.

“Billy the Retard,” I said.

“Billy the Retard,” he repeated.

“Big Bill,” I said.

“Big Bill,” he repeated.

“What’s happening?” I asked him.

He leaned in close to me. I could smell him. He smelled like the water and trees of home.

“They’re going to take the tomorrow out of our bones,” he said.

“The tomorrow?” I asked.

“The tomorrow,” repeated Billy.

I could hear his heart and stomach working inside his body.

“I dreamed it,” he said.

“I know it,” I said. “I dreamed it too.”

“They’re going to take the tomorrow,” Billy said again.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Big Bill,” said Billy the Retard.

“I don’t understand,” I said again.

The plane rose higher and higher above the earth. At that height, I knew gravity was a story passed from one generation of undiscovered birds to the next. At that height, oxygen was a sacrament.

The plane landed in a flat, anonymous desert. Other planes landed in the flat, anonymous desert.

A thousand Indians, beaten and exhausted, all dressed in red jumpsuits, stepped carefully from the planes, onto the tarmac crowded with soldiers, and huddled together in the lonely desert. We moved as one unit, as if we were migrating birds.

The soldiers’ faces were slack and anonymous, save for the brown face of the soldier-who-looked-like-me. We regarded each other. His eyes narrowed and he turned his head away with disdain or shame, or a combination of both, or perhaps with no emotion at all.

I recognized none of the other Indian prisoners, or perhaps I recognized all of them. In the haze and heat of the desert, we all looked alike, though I knew intuitively that we could not all look alike, especially given the vast tribal and geographic differences among us. But, as I scanned the faces around me, I saw that we all had the same brown skin, long noses, strong jawlines, and large cheekbones. We could all have been siblings. We could all have been the same person. We could all have been a thousand vestigial reproductions of a single organ, all of us struggling to find a purpose, a space to stand and breathe, enough room to function within the large body of a thing, a person, a crowd called Indian.

Like a newborn, I was losing my ability to tell the difference between my body and the body of the person next to me.

There, in the desert, the horizon was not a straight line stretched taut between the sky and earth. Instead, the horizon was a series of arcs that connected to form a circle of red sand that was a hundred miles wide at its diameter. I stood at the exact epicenter of that circle. I stood at the exact epicenter of seven different circles: circle of red sand, circle of Indians, circle of heat, circle of soldiers, circle of sun, circle of blood, circle of wind. Like a newborn, I turned my head and closed my eyes because it was all too much to comprehend. I listened and heard. Indians wept. I opened my eyes and witnessed. Children climbed into the arms of women strangers and reinvented their mothers. Men fainted and were held up only by the sheer weight of the people around them. The soldiers shouted at one another, then shouted at us. Soon, we were marched away from the plane and into the desert. We followed a path worn into the sand by thousands of recent footprints. Other Indians, other siblings. I knew that path would be swallowed up overnight by the sand and wind.

The soldiers marched us beyond the first horizon and through the one door carved into the desert floor. We carefully descended a long series of staircases. I counted steps. Fourteen steps to every flight of stairs. I counted flights. Ten, thirty, fifty, more. I counted and counted until the numbers grew too large for me to remember clearly. I counted until the numbers themselves held no meaning I could decipher. At the bottom of every flight of stairs, we paused on the landing. At every landing, another group of soldiers stood at the entrance of a long dark tunnel. At the mouth of every dark tunnel, more and more Indians were separated from the rest and marched into the darkness beyond. I wondered when it would be my turn to walk into the darkness. I was not afraid of it, the dark. I wanted to give it a name, so I called it Mother.

Finally, at the bottom of the last staircase, at the bottom of the world, I was marched into the darkness of the very last tunnel. Inside, it was cool, nearly cold, but dry. Beyond the walls, I could hear strange machinery working. I could hear voices in the distance. Screams, too. I walked with seven Indian strangers: two young girls who huddled together; a teenage boy whose eyes were twice as old as his face; two women, one of them pregnant; and two men, one of them large and imposing with a port-wine birthmark that covered half of his face and the other one smaller than me. With our shaved heads, in our red jumpsuits, we looked like we had been in a concentration camp for years, though we had been prisoners for only a matter of hours. Together, led by the soldiers, including the soldier-who-looked-like-me, we walked for miles, or for inches, I could no longer tell the difference. We marched through the darkness until we could see a bright light in the distance. The light grew larger and larger. I was afraid of it. I wanted to give it a name, so I called it Father.

Soon, the eight of us were marched out of the dark tunnel and into a long white hallway where white doors were evenly spaced along both sides like God’s teeth. We were marched through an open door at the end of that hallway and into a circular room. In the room, eight beds, each with clean sheets and thin blankets. In the room, an exposed toilet. In the room, a water faucet, a large plastic bucket, and eight small plastic cups. In the room, a surveillance camera.

No secrets in a circular room.

“Grab a bunk,” said a soldier with a large nose. His voice shook the floor of our room-cell and reverberated in the hollow bones of my feet.

Each of us, the eight Indians, chose a bed. I could not tell north from northwest. I only knew my position by the faces and shapes of my neighbors. On my immediate left, the pregnant Indian woman, then the two girls huddled together on one bed, then the small Indian man, then the other Indian woman, then the boy with old eyes, and then, to my immediate right, the large Indian man with the port-wine birthmark.

“Okay, listen up,” said the large-nose soldier. “I want to welcome all of you here. Now, I know you’ve been through a rough journey and the accommodations here are a bit spartan…”

“Why are we here?” shouted the large Indian man.

A nervous white soldier gently placed the muzzle of his rifle against the large Indian man’s forehead. The man was suddenly quiet. Though he had never fired a gun, had never been threatened with a gun, had never had the desire to use a gun, that Indian man understood the meaning of a gun held in white hands and pointed at a brown face. Genetic memory.