Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

Good, good. Now I want you to hold out your right hand, palm up.

Now, I want you to think hard about all that you have accomplished so far in your young lives. I want you to think about all the trophies on your mantels and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the news clippings in your scrapbooks and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the letters on your jackets and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all of your accolades and rewards and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. Can you see them? Can you imagine them? Can you feel them?

Good, good. Now, I want you to crush all of that in your fist. I want you to grind it into dust and throw all of it away.

Because none of it means anything now. Today is your new birthday. Your new beginning. And I am here to tell you that twenty-five percent of you will not make it through your freshman year. I am here to tell you that more than forty percent of you will not graduate from this university. I am here to tell you that all of you will engage in some form of illicit activity or another. In premarital sex, in drug and alcohol abuse, in academic dishonesty and plagiarism. And you will tell lies. To yourselves, to each other, to your professors, to your confessors, to me. Most of you will fall in love and all of you will not be loved enough. And through all the pain and loneliness, through all the late hours and early mornings, you will learn.

Yes, you will grow from the frightened and confused teenagers you are now into the slightly less frightened and slightly less confused adults you will become.

I am Father Arnold, President of St. Jerome the Second University. May God bless you in all of your various journeys.

Three weeks before Grace left for St. Jerome, her mother died of breast cancer. Grace had never known her father — he’d fallen off a building and was buried in the foundation of the Rockefeller National Bank Building. When she was sixteen, Grace had opened up a savings account there and, without fail, had deposited one hundred dollars a month.

After they’d graduated together from St. Junior, Grace and Roman were married in a quick Reno, Nevada, ceremony and then flew to Greenland where Roman played shooting guard for a horrible team called the Whales. They won two and lost thirty-five that first season, despite Roman’s twenty points and ten assists a game. The next year, the Whales won their first five games before the entire league went bankrupt. Grace and Roman then moved on to twelve other countries and nineteen other basketball teams in ten years before she’d woken up one bright morning in a Hilton Hotel in Madrid, Spain, with the sure knowledge that she wanted to return to the United States.

“Roman, are you awake?”

“I think it’s time for us to go home.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve done all you can do over here.”

She’d supported him, emotionally and spiritually, had traveled with him to more places than she cared to remember. She’d eaten great food and had been food-poisoned six different times — she couldn’t look at a mushroom without retching — and she was reasonably fluent in five different languages. How many Indians could say that? She’d watched every minute of every one of his games — only God knows how many — and had held him equally tight after good and bad performances.

She had never loved him because he was a basketball player. In fact, she’d loved him despite the fact that he was a basketball player. She’d always understood that his need to prove and test his masculinity was some genetic throwback. Given the choice, he’d rather have been a buffalo hunter and soldier killer than the point guard for the Lakers, but there was no such choice, of course. He couldn’t be an indigenous warrior or a Los Angeles Laker. He was an Indian man who’d invented a new tradition for himself, a manhood ceremony that had usually provided him with equal amounts of joy and pain, but his ceremony had slowly and surely become archaic. Though she’d never tell him such a thing, she’d suspected his ceremony might have been archaic from the beginning. After all, the root word for warrior was war, and he’d always been a peaceful and kind man, a man who’d refused to join anybody’s army, most especially if they were fighting and killing for something he believed in.

“You have lost the moment you pick up a gun,” he’d always said. “When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”

Lying together in that Madrid Hilton Hotel, with its tiny European bathroom and scratchy sheets, she’d realized how much she loved her idealistic and pompous husband.

“Let’s go home,” she’d said to him again.

“Why?” he’d asked.

“Because I want to,” she’d said to him again as he stood naked from the bed and walked across the thin carpet.

No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

All during that time, during his domestic and foreign basketball career, she’d been writing stories, poems, essays, and the first few chapters of various failed novels. She’d never told Roman about her writing because she’d wanted to keep something for herself; she’d wanted to enjoy a secret, perhaps sacred, endeavor, and writing seemed to be her best vocation and avocation. Under various pseudonyms, she’d published work in dozens of the various university literary journals back in the United States, though she’d never bothered to read any of her writing after it had been published. She didn’t even bother to keep originals, preferring to start all over with the first word of each new poem, story, or essay.

“Let’s go home,” she’d said to him as he stood at the window of the Madrid Hilton. He was naked and thin and would never be that lovely again.

“I’m afraid,” he’d said.

“Of what?”

“I’m afraid I won’t know how to do anything else.”

There, in Spain, he’d stood naked in the window and wept.

No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

“What if basketball is all I will ever be good at?”

“Hey,” she’d said. “You’re not even that good a basketball player.”

“Ouch,” he’d said and laughed. They’d laughed together, though both of them had a secret. His: he’d hated her, ever so briefly, for telling the truth about his failed dreams. Hers: she’d hated herself, ever so briefly, for devoting her life to his dreams.

Both of them had locked their secrets in dark boxes, never to be opened, and caught the next plane back to the United States.

On the Spokane Indian Reservation, on the morning of that first snow, Roman sat down to piss. He could hear the television playing in the living room. He could hear Michael Jordan’s voice.

I’m back.

Sure, Roman could have stood and pissed. That would have been easier, more convenient. Just pull it out and blast away. But he wanted to be polite, even kind to Grace. That was exactly what was missing in most marriages: politeness, courtesy, good manners. He was the kind of man who wrote thank-you notes to his wife for the smallest favors.

After years of marriage, Roman had learned one basic truth: It was easy to make another person happy.

To make Grace happy, Roman sat down to piss, did the dishes at least three times a week, vacuumed every day, and occasionally threw a load of laundry into the washer, though he’d often forgotten to transfer the wet clothes into the dryer. No matter. Grace didn’t sweat the small stuff, and with each passing day she loved him more and more.

I’m back.