Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

“How long before Paul graduates?” asked my father as we stood (I was the only one standing!) in our house. No, it wasn’t my house anymore. Only my ghost lived there now.

“Nine months,” I said. “In June.”

“Six to five against me making it.”

He always knew the odds. He’d always been a gambler and had lost more than one paycheck to the horses and the dogs and the Sonics and the Seahawks and the Mariners and the dice and the playing cards.

“I’ll bet twenty bucks you make it,” I said.

“I expect you to throw that Andrew Jackson in the coffin with me.”

“I expect you to buy me lunch in July.”

He wheeled himself into his bedroom at the back of the house. I hadn’t changed anything about his personal space, knowing that he would have resented the invasion.

“What did you do in here?” he asked.

“Can’t you tell?” I asked.

“Son, I’m mostly blind in one eye and I can’t see much out of the other.”

“Everything is the same,” I said (I lied) and wondered how long it would be before his vision left him forever.

His room had been the same for the last ten years, since my mother’s death. (His wife! His wife! Of course, that’s how he remembered her!) The same ratty chair, the same bookshelf overflowing with the same books, the same bed with the same two-by-fours holding it together. I’d been conceived in that bed, or so the legend goes. Of course, according to my father, I’d also been conceived in the front and/or backseat (and trunk!) of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu; in a telephone booth in downtown Seattle; on the seventeenth floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Minneapolis; on the living room couch during halftime of a Duke-North Carolina basketball game; in a powwow tepee in Browning, Montana; and amid the broken eggs and expired milk of a 7-Eleven walk-in freezer in Phoenix, Arizona.

I missed my mother like crazy. During all of my childhood bedtimes, she’d read me books (Whitman! Dickinson!) I could not understand and would not understand until many years later.

What is an Indian? Is it a boy who can sing the body electric or a woman who could not stop for death?

My siblings, three brothers and two sisters, were scattered in the indigenous winds, all of them living on somebody else’s reservation with lovers whose blood came from a dozen different tribes. I’d lost track of the number of nieces and nephews I had, but I didn’t feel too guilty about that because I’m quite sure that my brothers had also lost track of the number of kids they’d helped conceive (the Fathers of our Country!).

Though I didn’t see my siblings much, perhaps two or three times a year at family and tribal gatherings, we’d always been happy to see one another and had easily fallen back into our comfortable patterns: hugs, kisses, genial insults, then the stories about our mother, and finally the all-night games of Scrabble. None of us had ever found the need to chastise any of the others for our long absences from each other. We’d all pursued our very different versions of the American Dream (the Native American Dream!) and had all been successful to one degree or another. We were teacher, truck driver, logger, accountant, preacher, and guitar player. Our biggest success: we were all alive. Our biggest claim to fame: we were all sober.

In his bedroom, my father spun slow circles in his wheelchair. In his wallet, he kept photographs of all of his children, and pulled them out three or four times a day to examine them. He thought this small ceremony was a secret. Those photographs were wrinkled and faded with age and the touch of my father’s hands.

“Look at me,” he said as he spun in a figure eight. “I’m Mary Lou Retton.”

“Ten, ten, ten, but the East German gives him a three,” I said, reading the imaginary scores.

“Damn East Germans,” said my father. He stopped spinning and tried to catch his breath.

“I’m an old man,” he said.

“Hey, aren’t you tired?” I asked.

“Yeah, I could sleep.”

“You want to help me get you into bed?” I asked, carefully phrasing the question, setting down the pronouns in the most polite order. Of course, it was a rhetorical question. He couldn’t have made it by himself but he didn’t want to admit to his weakness by asking for help, and I didn’t want to point out his weakness by helping him without asking first. The unasked question, the unspoken answer, and so we remained quiet men in a country of quiet men.

“I am tired,” he said.

I picked him up, marveling again at how small he had become, and laid him down on his bed. I slid a pillow beneath his head and pulled a quilt over him. He looked up at me with his dark, Asian-shaped eyes. I’d inherited those eyes and their eccentric shapes. I wondered what else my father and I had constructed in our lives together. What skyscrapers, what houses, and what small rooms with uneven floors? I had never doubted his love for me, not once, and understood it to be enormous. I certainly loved him, but I didn’t know what exact shapes our love took when we pulled it (tenderness, regret, anger, and hope) out of our bodies and offered it for public inspection, for careful forensics.

“Go to sleep,” I whispered to my father. “I’ll make you some soup when you wake up.”

I’d left the reservation when I was eighteen years old, leaving with the full intention of coming back after I’d finished college. I had never wanted to contribute to the brain drain, to be yet another of the best and brightest Indians to abandon his or her tribe to the Indian leaders who couldn’t spell the word sovereignty. Yet no matter my idealistic notions, I have never again lived with my tribe. I left the reservation for the same reason a white kid leaves the cornfields of Iowa, or the coal mines of Pennsylvania, or the oil derricks of Texas: ambition. And I stayed away for the same reasons the white kids stayed away: more ambition. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the reservation when I was a child and I suppose I love it now as an adult (I live only sixty-five miles away), but it’s certainly a different sort of love. As an adult, I am fully conscious of the reservation’s weaknesses, its inherent limitations (geographic, social, economic, and spiritual), but as a child I’d believed the reservation to be an endless, magical place.

When I was six years old, a bear came out of hibernation too early, climbed up on the roof of the Catholic Church, and promptly fell back asleep. In itself not an amazing thing, but what had amazed me then, and amazes me now, is that nobody, not one Spokane Indian, bothered that bear. Nobody called the police or the Forest Service. None of the Indian hunters took advantage of a defenseless animal, even those Indian hunters who’d always taken advantage of defenseless animals and humans. Hell, even the reservation dogs stopped barking whenever they strolled past the church. We all, dogs and Indians alike, just continued on with our lives, going to work or school, playing basketball and hide-and-seek, scratching at fleas, sleeping with other people’s spouses, marking our territory, while that bear slept on.

During that brief and magical time, “How’s the bear?” replaced “How are you doing?” as the standard greeting.

What is an Indian? Is it the lead actor in a miracle or the witness who remembers the miracle?

For three or four days, that bear (that Indian!) had slept, unmolested, dreaming his bear dreams, until the bright sun had disturbed him one sunrise. Bob May happened to be there with his camera and shot up a roll of film as the bear climbed down from the church, stretched his spine and legs, and then ambled off into the woods, never to be seen again.

But all of that was years ago, decades ago, long before I brought my father home from the hospital to die, before I left him alone in his bedroom where he dreamed his diabetic dreams.