Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

“Is that it? Stuff? Stuff? Is that your whole proof on this thing? All that proves is that Jesus might have been a good magician. He might have been a good fisherman. He might have been a good baker. But it absolutely does not prove that he was a good carpenter. I mean, there Jesus was, running all over the place, trying to save the world. Do you really think he had time to study carpentry? Do you really think he had the time to study his tools, to memorize them, to understand them? Do you really think he had the time to devote himself to wood?”

“He was the Son of God. I think he could multitask.”

“Multitask!” shouted Wonder Horse. “Multitask! Where do you learn that shit?”

“Television.”

“Television? Television? Is that all you have to say to me?”

“I guess,” said Sweetwater.

They were building a wheelchair ramp for my father, who was coming home because he didn’t want to die in the hospital.

Inside the house, I was looking for those things that could kill my father, for those things that had already killed him, or rather had already assigned to him an appointment with death, an appointment he would not and could not miss. Among the most dangerous or near-dangerous: two boxes of donuts buried beneath Pendleton blankets on the top shelf of his closet; a quart of chocolate milk lying flat in the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer; a six-pack of soda pop submerged in the lukewarm water of the toilet tank; hard candy stuffed deeply into the pockets of every coat he owned; and then more hard candy stuffed into the pockets of my late mother’s coats, my siblings’ long-abandoned coats, and the coats I wore when I was a child, still hanging in the closet in the bedroom where I had not slept in ten years. Together, these items represented my father’s first line of defense. He knew they would be found easily. He intended them to be found easily. Decoys. Camouflage. My father was smart. He’d sacrifice a few treasures in order to distract me from the large caches. In the garage, I poured out ten pounds of Hershey’s chocolate kisses one by one from an aluminum gas can. In the attic, I wore gloves and long sleeves when I pulled seven Payday peanut bars from between layers of fiberglass insulation. I flipped through fifty-two westerns, twelve mysteries, and nine true-crime books, and discovered one hundred and twelve fruit wraps pressed tightly between the pages. Inside the doghouse, a Tupperware container filled with Oreo cookies was duct-taped to the ceiling. I gathered all of it, all of those things that my father stupidly loved, and filled seven shopping bags. Most people would have quit searching then, assured they’d emptied the house of its dangers, but I knew my father. I could see him. I could read his mind. I found three pounds of loose sugar waiting beneath three inches of flour in the flour sack. Carefully hidden beneath a layer of frost, popsicles were frozen to the freezer walls. How could my father accomplish such a thing? What were the mechanics? I had no idea, but I found my father’s sweet treasures, proving once again that the result is more important than the process. In his bedroom, I lifted the northwest corner of the carpet and found more candy bars, moldy, apparently forgotten. But then, remembering my father’s clever mind, I pulled the carpet back a few more inches, and discovered new chocolate bars carefully wrapped in aluminum foil. I filled more shopping bags (two, nine, thirteen bags) and carried them outside, past Wonder Horse and Sweetwater pounding the last few nails into place, and tossed the bags in a pile on the road. There, with the sky clear and blue, I doused those bags with kerosene and dropped a burning match on the pile.

Later that day, I lifted my father from the passenger seat of my van, a Ford with more than two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. My father carried sixty-five years on his odometer and had lost forty pounds in the last few months. I carried him easily over to his electric wheelchair (purchased for five hundred dollars from a white woman whose paraplegic husband had died) and set him in the worn leather seat. He looked so frail that I wondered if he had the strength to move the joystick that powered the chair.

“Can you make it?” I asked.

Of course he could. He was a man who used to teach ballroom dancing, back when he was young and strong and financing his communications education at the University of Washington (he’d always meant to start his own radio station on the reservation). He was the man who had taught me how to waltz about fifteen minutes before I’d left to pick up my date for the high school prom. I’d always wondered how we looked: two tall Indian men, father and son, spinning around the living room of a reservation HUD house.

My father guided the wheelchair up the ramp. I wasn’t nervous about its construction. I trusted Sweetwater and Wonder Horse. I knew the ramp would hold.

“Sweet and Wonder?” asked my father, using the nicknames only men of a certain generation were allowed to use.

“Yeah,” I said. “But they got in a fight about Jesus. I don’t think they’re on speaking terms now.”

“They’re like an old married couple, enit?”

“They’ll kiss and make up.”

“They always do.”

My mother had died ten years earlier from a brain tumor. She had been a librarian, a lover of books. By the end of her life, she could no longer speak, let alone read, so she had no last words from her deathbed, only the slow blinking of her eyes, and then the fading of the light behind them. It had been a quiet death for a woman with such a large vocabulary.

I followed my father and his chair into the house. He had not been here in some weeks and so was surprised to see the amount of home improvement I had done myself or had paid others to do. Or rather, he was surprised at the improvements he could see, since his vision was impaired by the blood that flowed from the broken veins in his eyes. The walls were painted a fresh white, a new carpet had replaced the twenty-five-year-old shag, and family photographs were fitted with new frames. Cosmetic changes, really, but my father acted as if I’d built him a mansion.

“You’re good to me,” he said. I didn’t know if that was completely true, or if it had ever been true, even in part.

“You didn’t have to do this,” he said. “I’m not going to live long enough to get it ugly again.”

“Hey,” I said. “They always underestimate Indians. You’re going to make it until next Christmas, at least. You eat better and you’ll see Paul graduate high school.”

Paul was my son. He lived with his Lummi Indian mother in Seattle, exactly two hundred and seventy-nine miles from my house in Spokane. She’d remarried a white man who made a lot more money than I did. He was a consultant for one thing or another — one of those jobs that only white guys seem to get. Consultant. He consulted. Others paid him to consult. They wanted to be consulted. He wanted to consult. All around me, white men were consulting other white men. My son lived with a consultor, or was it spelled differently? Did my son live with a consulter? The whole world could live in the space between that o and that e. My son lived in that space. My son asked another man for consultation. He was an Indian consultantee loved fiercely by a white consultant. Sure, my vocabulary was bitter (She’d chosen somebody over me!) but I was happy the white man, the stepfather, was able to provide my son with a better life than I would have on my high school English teacher’s salary. And I was happy that my son was living in Seattle, where twenty percent of the city was brown-skinned, instead of Spokane, where ninety-nine percent of the people were white. I’m not exactly racist. I like white people as a theory; I’m just not crazy about them in practice. But, all in all, ours was a good divorce. I still loved my ex-wife, without missing her or our marriage (I’m a liar), and spent every other weekend, all of the major holidays, and most of the minor ones, with the three of them in Seattle — all of us having decided to make it work, as the therapists had said. The nontraditional arrangement, this extended family, was strange when measured by white standards, but was very traditional by Indian standards. What is an Indian? Is it a child who can stroll unannounced through the front doors of seventeen different houses?