Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

“Choose your three,” Roman was often fond of pontificating. “And stick with them.”

Roman himself believed in free expression, Grace Atwater, and basketball. Neither a Republican nor a Democrat, Roman had always voted for the candidate who looked like he or she could hit a twenty-foot jump shot with three seconds left on the clock and the home team down by one. Therefore, he was very excited that Bill Bradley, former Princeton All-American and New York Knick, was running for President of the United States.

“Finally, a worthy candidate,” Roman had said during Bradley’s first press conference.

“Come on,” Grace had said. “You can’t vote for a guy with a jump shot that ugly. And besides, you grew up in a matriarchy. You should vote for a woman.”

“If there’s a woman out there with a jump shot,” Roman had replied, “who believes in the socialization of medicine and education, then I will not only vote for her, but I will also devote my life to her administration.”

“Well, then, I guess that means I’m running for president,” she’d said.

“Now, wouldn’t that surprise the hell out of them? I expect to see your announcement on television soon.”

“I will begin my press conference by announcing that yes, I have smoked pot, and yes, I have had sex, lots of sex. In fact, I will introduce the seven men and one woman I have slept with and let them answer all the questions regarding my campaign and political philosophies.”

“You will be a hero to all women and men.”

“That’s the power of television.”

Roman had bought the satellite dish, spending most of the money he’d won by hitting a trifecta at Playfair Race Track in Spokane, because he’d wanted to enrich his life by partaking in the free expression of sitcom writers and shopping-channel salespeople, and because he wanted to provide Grace with a source of entertainment, education, and dozens of episodes of Bonanza, featuring the talents of her favorite actor, Dan “Hoss” Blocker, and because he wanted to watch every single college and professional basketball game ever played.

Though he rarely played seriously anymore, preferring to shoot baskets all by himself, he still loved the game and all of its details. For Roman, the beauty of a perfect pick-and-roll by the Utah Jazz’s John Stockton and Karl Malone was matched only by the beauty of a perfect pick-and-roll by John and Michelle Sirois, the best brother and sister nine-year-old hoopsters on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Roman knew that basketball was the most democratic sport. All you needed to play was something that resembled a ball and something else that approximated the shape of a basket.

These days, Roman himself resembled a basketball and hoop. But he didn’t mind so much. Half of the Indians on the rez were fat and they all got laid by skinny and fat people alike. Standards of beauty were much more egalitarian on the rez, and Roman was an egalitarian man.

On the morning after the first snow, Roman slept on the couch in the living room. Across the room, a twelve-inch black-and-white television was balanced on top of a twenty-seven-inch color television. The small television had a great picture but no sound, while the large one had great sound and terrible reception. Roman called his televisions the Lone Ranger and Tonto, though he never told anybody which television was which. That morning, as the first snow drifted against the door, both televisions replayed a classic press conference from a few years earlier:

Michael Jordan, wearing a custom-tailored

Armani suit, stands at a podium in some beautiful hotel in downtown Chicago. His ebony skin reflects dozens of flashbulbs. He leans close to the porcupine of microphones rising from the podium. He smiles. Yesterday, he was playing minor league baseball, swinging at and missing curve balls by at least two feet. Today, the room is as silent as a Catholic Church on a Tuesday afternoon in July. Jordan licks his lips, takes a breath, drawing out the moment, ever the showman, ever the competitor, and says, “I’m back.”

Still asleep on the couch, holding a basketball like a lover in his arms, Roman was wrapped up like a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound butterfly in a Pendleton-blanket cocoon. He wore a huge white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. He heard those words. He heard “I’m back,” and he stirred in his sleep.

I’m back.

Still holding the basketball, Roman sat up with a bolt and stared at the television. For just a brief moment, he wondered if Jordan was coming back for the second time but then Roman came to his senses.

I’m back.

Roman remembered when Michael Jordan had announced he was returning to basketball. There had been joy, pure unadulterated joy, in Jordan’s voice, in stark contrast to the grief and pain when he’d announced his retirement just a few short days after his father had been murdered by two teenage thugs. Roman recalled that one of those killers was a Lumbee Indian, a disturbing fact. But then again, it was Indian scouts who had helped white people kill Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and every other Indian warrior in the world.

I’m back.

After he’d returned to the NBA, Jordan had promptly led his Chicago Bulls to three more championships, the last coming on the final jump shot of Jordan’s career, before he’d retired again and left Roman no options other than to take up coaching grade-school basketball at the Spokane Indian Tribal School.

I’m back.

Sitting in front of his two televisions, holding the basketball in one hand, Roman ran his other hand through his greasy black hair, always too thick to properly braid, and then swallowed the last drink out of a two-liter Diet Pepsi bottle sitting on the coffee table.

Roman was forty years old and forty pounds overweight. He pulled his thick, heavy body from the couch and shuffled from the living room into the bathroom. He tugged his underwear down to his ankles and sat on the toilet for a long morning piss. He’d always been a gentleman and knew that a stand-up piss made a terrible mess, no matter the accuracy of the shooter.

Roman Gabriel Fury was named after an obscure professional football quarterback named Roman Gabriel — a man with his own kind of fury and the rumor of Indian blood — who’d toiled for the Los Angeles Rams in the early seventies. Young Roman had never seen the elder Roman play, not in person, not on television, though one photograph of the dark-haired quarterback had been framed and nailed to the wall above the Fury fireplace.

“Was he your favorite player?” young Roman had once asked his father, Edgar Fury, in an effort to understand why he’d chosen such an ornate moniker for his only child.

“No,” Edgar had said. “Just liked the name.”

“I don’t like it much.”

“Well, just be glad your name ain’t Namath Fury. Or Tarkenton Fury, for that matter. I could have named you after some old white boy quarterback.”

Partly because of his name and partly because of his own stubborn nature, Roman Fury had never played football. Instead, he’d played basketball until his palms bled, and read books, hundreds of books, thereby saving himself from a lifetime of reservation poverty.

Oh, to this day, he still loved the reservation — he lived there, after all — but there was a time when he’d wanted to travel, when he’d known that he belonged elsewhere. From the very beginning of his life, he’d dreamed of leaving, not because he needed to escape — though his journey certainly could have been viewed as a form of flight — but because he’d always known that his true and real mission lay somewhere outside the boundaries of the reservation. There were Indians who belonged on the reservation and there were Indians who belonged in the city, and then there were those rare few who could live successfully in either place. But Roman had always felt like he didn’t belong anywhere, like he couldn’t belong to any one place or any series of places. Though his tribe had never been nomadic, he’d been born with the need to visit cities — every city! — where no Spokane Indian had ever been before.