Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

“Fair enough,” said Low Man. “What if there’s just a head?”

The cashier ran through the 7-Eleven employee’s handbook in his memory, searching for the proper way to deal with a crazy customer, a man who may or may not have a dead man — or pieces of a dead man — in his suitcase, but who most definitely had a thing for bookstores. The cashier had always been a good employee; his work ethic was quite advanced for somebody so young. But there was no official company policy, no corporate ethic, when it came to dealing with a man — an Indian man — who had so much pain illuminating both of his eyes.

“Mister,” said the cashier, forced to improvise. “This is Montana. Everybody’s got a gun. Including me. And since you aren’t from Montana, and I can tell that by looking at you, then you most likely don’t have a gun.”

“Your point being?”

“I’m going to shoot you in the ass if you don’t exit the store immediately.”

“Fine,” said Low Man. “You can keep the damn bag anyway.”

Leaving his suitcase behind, Low Man walked out of the store. He still carried his computer case and the yellow page with Bread and Books’ address.

In the 7-Eleven, the cashier waited until the Indian was out of sight before he carefully opened the suitcase to find two pairs of shoes, a suit jacket, four shirts, two pairs of pants, and assorted socks and underwear. He also found a copy of Red Rain and discovered Low Man’s photograph on the back of the book.

Away from that black-and-white image taken fifty pounds earlier, Low Man walked until he stumbled across the Barnes and Noble superstore filling up one corner of an ugly strip mall.

Fucking colonial clipper ships are everywhere, thought Low Man, even in Missoula, Montana. But he secretly loved the big green boats, mostly because they sold tons of his books.

Low Man stepped into the store, found the mystery section, gathered all the copies of his books, soft and hard, and carried them to the information desk.

“I want to sign these,” he said to the woman working there.

“Why?”

“Because I wrote them.”

“Oh,” said the woman, immediately dropping into some highly trained and utterly pleasant demeanor. Perhaps everybody in Missoula, Montana, loved their jobs. “Please, let me get the manager. She’ll be glad to help you.”

“Hold on,” said Low Man as he handed her the yellow page. “Do you know where this place is?”

“Breads?”

There it was again, the place with the nickname. Everybody must go there. At that moment, there could be dozens of people in Breads. Low Man wondered if there was a woman, a lovely woman in the bookstore, a lonely woman who would drag him back to her house and make love to him without removing any of her clothes.

“Is it a good store?” asked Low Man.

“I used to work there,” she said. “It closed down a month ago.”

Low Man wondered if her eyes changed color when she mourned.

“The kid at 7-Eleven didn’t tell me that.”

“Oh,” said the woman, completely confused. She was young, just months out of some small Montana town like Wolf Point or Harlem or Ronan, soon to return. “Well, let me get the manager.”

“Wait,” said Low Man, handing her his computer case. “I found this over in the mystery section.”

He’d purchased the computer case through a catalogue, and had regretted it ever since. The bag was bulky, heavy, poorly designed.

“Thank you. I’ll put it in Lost and Found.”

Low Man’s computer was an outdated Apple, its hard drive stuffed to the brim with three unpublished mystery novels and hundreds of programs and applications that he’d never used after downloading them.

Free of his possessions, Low Man waited. He watched the men and women move through the bookstore.

He wondered what Missoula meant, if there’d been some cavalry soldier named Missoula who’d made this part of the world safe for white people. He wondered if he could kill somebody, an Indian or a white soldier, and what it would feel like. He wondered if he would cry when he had to wash blood from his hands.

He studied the faces of the white people in the store. He decided to choose the one that he would kill if he were forced to kill. Not the woman with the child, and certainly not the child, but maybe the man reading movie magazines, and, most likely, the old man asleep in the poetry-section chair.

Low Man stared at the gold band on the dead man’s left hand. Low Man was still staring when the dead man woke up and walked out of the store.

Low Man had been married twice, to a Lummi woman and a Yakama woman, and had fathered three kids, one each with his ex-wives, the third the result of a one-night stand with a white woman in Santa Fe. He sent money and books to his Indian children, but he hadn’t seen his white kid in ten years.

“Mr. Smith, Low Man Smith?” asked the Barnes and Noble manager upon her arrival in Low Man’s world. She was blond, blue-eyed, plain.

“Please,” he said. “Call me Chuck.”

“My name is Eryn.”

Low Man wondered if he was going to sleep with her, this Eryn. He’d spent many nights in hotel rooms with various bookstore employees and literary groupies. That was one of the unpublicized perks of the job. He always wondered what the women saw in him, why they wanted to have sex with a stranger simply based on his ability to create compelling metaphors, or even when he failed to create compelling metaphors. The women were interested in him no matter what The New York Times Book Review had to say about his latest novel. Low Man was bored with his own writing, with his books, and to be honest, he’d grown bored with his literary life and the sexual promiscuity that seemed to go with it. Last year, after meeting Carlotta at the Native American Children of Alcoholics convention in Albuquerque, after sharing a bed with her for five nights, he’d vowed to remain faithful to her — and had been faithful to her and the idea of her — even though they’d made no promises to each other, even though she’d talked openly of the three men who were actively pursuing her, of the one man that she still loved, who had never been named Chuck.

“Mr. Smith, Chuck?” asked Eryn, the Barnes and Noble manager. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, sorry,” said Low Man. “I’m very tired.”

“I wish we’d known you were going to be in town,” she said. “We would have ordered more copies of your books.”

She smiled. Low Man decided that she was the kind of woman who lost sleep so that she could finish reading a good novel. He wondered if he was going to wake up before her the next morning and pass the time by scanning the titles of the books stacked on her nightstand.

“I didn’t know I was going to be in Missoula,” he said. “I was supposed to be spending a week up on the Flathead Reservation.”

“Oh, I thought you might be here to see Tracy.”

“Who?”

“Tracy,” said the manager, and when that elicited no response from Low Man, she added, “Tracy Johnson. You went to college together, right?”

“She lives here?”

“Actually, she works here at the bookstore.”

“Really?”

“Well, she’s here part-time while she’s getting her MFA at the university.”

“She’s a writer?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know that?”

“I haven’t seen Tracy in ten years,” said Low Man.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them again two uniformed police officers were standing in front of him. One of the officers, the tall one with blue eyes, carried Low Man’s suitcase.

“Mr. Smith,” said the tall cop. “Are you Mr. Smith?”

“No, no,” said Low Man. “You must be mistaken. My name is Crazy Horse.”