Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

Nine decades later, on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Grandmother Fury said a prayer for Joseph and stirred a few more slices of smoked salmon into the pot of oats boiling on her woodstove. At that point, many cooks would have poured in the milk and brought it all back to the boil. But Grandmother Fury was cousin to salmon and knew their secrets. She poured the ice-cold milk over the boiling salmon and oats just a few seconds before serving. In that collision between heat and cold, between mammal and fish, between liquid and solid, there was so much magic that Grandmother Fury trembled as she set a bowl in front of her grandson and watched him eat.

“It’s good,” said Roman. He was eighteen years old and lovely in his grandmother’s eyes.

“But you haven’t even tasted it,” she said, in Spokane, the tribal language.

“Don’t have to,” said Roman in English. “I believe in your mush more than I believe in God.”

“You liar,” she said in Spokane and laughed.

“Yes,” he said in English. “But it’s a good lie.”

Grandmother and grandson sat in the small kitchen of her home — their home! — and found no need to speak to each other. Because they were Indians, they gave each other room to think, to invent the next lie, joke, story, compliment, or insult. He ate; she watched.

That afternoon, Roman was going to take the Colonial Aptitude Test, his college boards, and hoped to score high enough to get into college, any college. He was the first member of his extended family who’d even wanted to pursue higher education. In fact, there were only a couple of dozen Spokane Indians who’d ever graduated from any four-year university and only a few more than that who’d bothered to attend even the smallest community college.

A few small colleges had offered full basketball scholarships to Roman, but he’d turned them down. He wanted to attend the best school possible, whether he played basketball for them or not.

“You know,” Grandmother Fury said in rough English, in careful and clumsy syllables, after Roman had finished one bowl of mush and started in on another. “Those college tests, they’re not for Indians.”

Roman nodded his head. He knew the Colonial Aptitude Test was culturally biased, but he also knew the CAT was supposed to be culturally biased. The CAT was designed to exclude from college as many poor people as statistically possible. Despite the rumors of democracy and fairness, Roman knew, when it came to the CAT, that meritocracy was to college as fish was to bicycle. He knew the CAT was an act of war. As a result, Roman wasn’t approaching the test with intellect and imagination. He was going to attack it with all of the hatred and anger in his heart.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” she said in Spokane.

“I don’t want to be afraid.”

“Yes, I know,” she said in English.

With tears in his eyes and a salty taste at the back of his throat, Roman finished another bowl of salmon mush and asked for another.

“Yes,” said his grandmother. She said, “Yes.”

Three months later, Roman Gabriel Fury sat in the waiting room of the Colonial Aptitude Testing Service office in Spokane, Washington. He held two letters in his hands. One letter congratulated him on his exceptional CAT performance. The other letter requested his presence for a special meeting with the president of the Colonial Aptitude Testing Service.

Nervous and proud, Roman wondered if he was going to be given a special commendation, a reward for such a high score, unusually high for anybody, let alone an Indian boy who’d attended a reservation high school without chemistry, geometry, or foreign-language classes.

Sitting in the CAT office, in that small city named after his tribe, Roman wore his best suit, his only suit, a JCPenney special that his father had purchased for him four years earlier. Roman’s father was a poor and generous man who had given his son many things over the years, mostly inexpensive trinkets whose only value was emotional, but the JCPenney suit was expensive, perhaps the most expensive gift that Roman had ever received, certainly more valuable than being named after a professional quarterback who had some Indian blood, or the rumor of Indian blood. Young Roman had often wished his father had given him the name of the other professional Indian quarterback, Sonny Six Killer, the one who had demonstrable Indian blood. Roman Gabriel Fury often wished that his name was Sonny Six Killer Fury. With a name like that, Roman knew that he could have become a warrior.

“Mr. Furry,” said the CAT secretary, mispronouncing his name for the third time, adding an extra r that changed Roman from an angry Indian into a cute rodent. She sat behind a small desk. She’d worked for CAT for ten years. She’d never taken any of their tests.

Roman sat in silence. He hated wooden chairs.

“Mr. Furry,” she said.

“I’m not a hamster,” said Roman.

“Excuse me?”

“My name is not Furry. It’s not Hairy or Hirsute either. My name is Fury, as in righteous anger.”

“You don’t have to be so impolite.”

“You don’t have to mispronounce my name.”

“Well, Mr. Fury,” she said, feeling somehow smaller in the presence of a boy who was twenty years younger. “You can go in now. Mr. Williams will see you.”

“Assuming that he has eyes, I’m sure that’s an anatomical possibility.”

Roman stepped into another office and sat in another wooden chair across a large oak desk from Mr. Williams, a white man who studied, or pretended to study, the contents of a file folder.

“Hmmm,” said Mr. Williams, as if the guttural were an important part of his vocabulary.

“Yes,” said Roman, because he wanted to be the first one to use a word actually found in Webster’s Dictionary, Ninth Edition.

“Well,” said Mr. Williams. “Let me see here. It says here in your file that you’re eighteen years old, a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, valedictorian of Wellpinit High School on said reservation, captain of the chess, math, history, and basketball teams, accepted on full academic scholarship to St. Jerome the Second University here in Spokane.”

“Yes,” said Roman, with the same inflection as before.

“That’s quite the all-American résumé, Mr. Fury.”

“No, I think it’s more of an all-Native American résumé.”

Mr. Williams smiled. His teeth, skin, and pinstriped suit were all the same shade of gray. Roman couldn’t tell where the three-season wool ended and where the man began.

“Roman Gabriel Fury,” said Williams. “Quite an interesting name.”

“Normally, I’d say thank you, sir, but I don’t think that was a sincere compliment, was it?”

“Just an observation, young Mr. Fury. I am very good with observation. In fact, at this very moment, I am observing the fact that your parents are absent. A very distressing observation, to be sure, considering our specific request that your mother and father attend this meeting with you.”

“Sir, my parents are dead. If you’d read my file in its entirety, you might have observed that.”

Mr. Williams’s eyes flashed with anger, the first display of any color. He flipped through the file, searching for the two words that would confirm the truth: deceased, deceased.

At that moment, if Roman had closed his eyes, he could have seen the yellow headlights of the red truck that smashed head-on into his father’s blue Chevy out on Reservation Road. He could have remembered that his father was buried in a brown suit. At that moment, if Roman had closed his eyes, he could have seen his mother’s red blood coughed into the folds of a white handkerchief. Roman was three years old when his mother was buried in a purple dress. He barely remembered her.