Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

She smelled like smoke.

We made love.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she said.

On the other side of the glass, they watched us. They were always watching us.

“Don’t let them hurt you,” she said.

My mother kissed my forehead. Her breath smelled of coffee and peppermint — the scent of forgiveness, of safety and warmth. She chased my nightmares out of the house with her mother’s broom.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she said. “And they can’t see you.”

We made love.

The two soldiers stood above us and prayed. They took deep breaths and smelled coffee and peppermint.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “We’re alone, we’re alone.”

I kept my eyes closed as I found my way inside of her, as I walked through the rooms of her, as I opened one door after another, as I found a bed where I could lie down and cover myself with thick quilts.

They wanted our blood. They would always want our blood.

“Hide,” she said. “Don’t let them see you.”

Inside of her, I breathed in the dark. I was warm; I was safe.

“Are you my mother?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. She said, “Yes.”

“Mother,” I whispered. “Mother, mother, mother.”

LOW MAN SMITH STEPPED off the airplane in Missoula, Montana, walked up the humid jetway, and entered the air-conditioned terminal. He was excited that he was about to see her, Carlotta, the Navajo woman who lived on the Flathead Indian Reservation. All during the flight from Seattle, he’d been wondering what he would first say to her, this poet who taught English at the Flathead Indian College, and had carried on a fierce and exhausting internal debate on the matter. He’d finally decided, just as the plane touched down, to begin his new life with a simple declaration: “Thank you for inviting me.”

He practiced those five words in his head— thank you for inviting me —and chastised himself for not learning to say them in her language, in Navajo, in Dine.

He was a Coeur d’Alene Indian, even though his mother was white. He’d been born and raised in Seattle, didn’t speak his own tribal language, and had visited his home reservation only six times in his life. His mother had often tried to push Low Man toward the reservation, toward his cousins, aunts, and uncles — all of those who had survived one war or another — but Low Man just wasn’t interested, especially after his Coeur d’Alene father died of a heart attack while welding together one of the last great ships in Elliott Bay. More accurately, Low Man’s father had drowned after his heart attack had knocked him unconscious and then off the boat into the water.

Low Man believed the Coeur d’Alene Reservation to be a monotonous place — a wet kind of monotony that white tourists saw as spiritual and magic. Tourists snapped off dozens of photographs and tried to capture it — the wet, spiritual monotony — before they climbed back into their rental cars and drove away to the next reservation on their itineraries.

The tourists didn’t know, and never would have guessed, that the reservation’s monotony might last for months, sometimes years, before one man would eventually pull a pistol from a secret place and shoot another man in the face, or before a group of women would drag another woman out of her house and beat her left eye clean out of her skull. After that first act of violence, rival families would issue calls for revenge and organize the retaliatory beatings. Afterward, three or four people would wash the blood from their hands and hide in the hills, causing white men to write editorials, all of this news immediately followed by capture, trial, verdict, and bus ride to prison. And then, only then, would the long silence, the monotony, resume.

Walking through the Missoula airport, Low Man wondered if the Flathead Reservation was a dangerous place, if it was a small country where the king established a new set of laws with every sunrise.

Carrying a suitcase and computer bag, Low Man searched for Carlotta’s face, her round, purple-dark face, in the crowd of people — most of them white men in cowboy hats — who waited at the gate. Instead, he saw an old Indian man holding a hardcover novel above his head.

“I wrote that book,” Low Man said proudly to the old man, who stood with most of his weight balanced on his left hip.

“You’re him, then,” said the old man. “The mystery writer.”

“I am, then,” said Low Man.

“I’m Carlotta's boss, Raymond. She sent me.”

“It’s good to meet you, Ray. Where is she?”

“My name is Raymond. And she’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yeah, gone.”

Low Man wondered if gone carried a whole different meaning in the state of Montana. Perhaps, under the Big Sky, being gone meant that you were having lunch, or that your car had run out of gas, or that you’d broken your leg in a fly-fishing accident and were stranded in a hospital bed, doped up on painkillers, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the man you loved more than anything else in the world.

“Where, exactly, is gone?” asked Low Man.

The old man’s left eye was cloudy with glaucoma. Low Man wondered about the quality of Raymond’s depth perception.

“She got married yesterday,” said the old man. “She and Chuck woke up before sunrise and drove for Flagstaff.”

“Flagstaff?” asked Low Man, desperately trying to remember when he had last talked to Carlotta. When? Three days ago, for just a minute, to confirm the details of his imminent arrival.

“Arizona?” Low Man asked.

“Yeah, that’s where she and Chuck grew up.”

“Who is Chuck?”

“That’s her husband,” said Raymond.

“Obviously.”

Low Man needed a drink. He’d been sober for ten years, but he still needed a drink. Not of alcohol, no, but of something. He never worried about falling off the wagon, not anymore. He had spent many nights in hotel rooms where the mini-bars were filled with booze, but had given in only to the temptations of the three-dollar candy bars.

“Ray,” said Low Man. “Can we, please, just put a hold on this conversation while I go find me a pop?”

“Carlotta’s been sober for six years,” said the old man.

“Yes, I know. That’s one of the reasons I came here.”

“She told me you drank a lot of soda pop. Said it was your substitute addiction.”

Shaking his head, Low Man found a snack bar, ordered a large soda, finished it with three swallows, and then ordered another.

When he was working on a book, when he was writing, Low Man would drink a six-pack of soda every hour or so, and then, hopped up on the caffeine, he’d pound the keyboard, chapter after chapter, until carpal tunnel syndrome fossilized the bones in his wrists. There it was, the central dilemma of his warrior life: repetitive stress. In his day, Crazy Horse had to worry about Custer and the patriotic sociopaths of the Seventh Cavalry.

“Okay,” said Low Man. “Now, tell me, please, Raymond, how long has Carlotta been planning on getting married?”

“Oh, jeez,” said Raymond. “She wasn’t planning it at all. But Chuck showed up a couple days back, they were honeyhearts way back when, and just swept her off her feet. He’s been sober for eleven years.”

“One more than me.”

“Oh, yeah, but I don’t think that was the reason she married him.”

“No, I imagine not.”

“Well, I better get going. I got to pick up my grandchildren from school.”

“Ray?”

“It’s Raymond.”

Low Man wondered what had happened to the Indian men who loved their nicknames, who earned their nicknames? His father had run around with indigenous legends named Bug, Mouse, Stubby, and Stink-Head.