Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

What is an Indian? Is it a son who can stand in a doorway and watch his father sleep?

Just after sundown, I woke my father from his nap, set him in his wheelchair, and rolled him into the kitchen.

“Do you remember that Catholic bear?” I asked him as we ate tomato soup at the table, which was really just a maple-wood door nailed to four two-by-sixes. The brass doorknob was still attached. The tomato soup was homemade, from my father’s recipe. He’d once been the head chef at Ankeny’s, the best restaurant in Spokane. I’d waited tables there one summer and made fifty bucks in tips every shift. Good money for an eighteen-year-old. Better yet, I’d lost my virginity on a cool July evening to a waitress named Carla, a white woman who was twenty years older. She’d always called me sweetheart and had let me sleep with her only once. Any more than that, she’d said, and you’re going to fall in love with me, and then I’ll just have to break your heart. I’d been grateful to her and told her so. I never saw her again after that summer, but I sent her Christmas cards for ten years, even though I’d never received a response, and only stopped when the last card had been returned with no forwarding address.

“The one that climbed on the church?” asked my father, remembering. His hand trembled as he lifted his spoon to his lips. He’d slept for three hours but he still looked exhausted.

“Yeah, what do you think happened to it?” I asked.

“It owns a small auto shop in beautiful Edmonton, British Columbia.”

“Bear’s Repairs?”

“Exactly.”

We laughed together at our silly joke, until he coughed and gagged. My father, once a handsome man who’d worn string ties and fedoras, was now an old man, a tattered bathrobe on a stick.

“Excuse me,” he said, strangely polite, as he spat into his cup.

We ate without further conversation. What was there to say? He slurped his soup, a culinary habit that had irritated me throughout our lives together, but I didn’t mind it at all as we shared that particular meal.

“When are you heading back to Spokane?” he asked after he finished eating and pushed away his empty bowl.

“I’m not.”

“Don’t you have to teach?”

“I took a leave of absence. I think the Catholic teenagers of Spokane, Washington, can diagram sentences and misread To Kill a Mockingbird without me.”

“Are you sure about that, Atticus?”

“Positive.”

He picked at his teeth with his tongue. He was thinking hard.

“What are you going to do about money?” he asked.

“I’ve got some saved up,” I said. Of course, in my economic dictionary, I’d discovered some meant very little. I had three thousand dollars in savings and maybe five hundred in checking. I’d been hoping it would last six months, or until my father died. By the light in his eyes, I knew he was guessing at exactly how much I’d saved and also wondering if it would last. He carried a tiny life insurance policy that would pay for the cost of his burial.

“It’s you and me, then,” he said.

“Yes.”

He wouldn’t look at me. “What do you think they did with them?”

“With what?”

“My feet,” he said. We both looked down at his legs, at the bandaged stumps where his feet used to be.

“I think they burn them,” I said.

What is an Indian?

That’s what the professor wrote on the chalkboard three minutes into the first class of my freshman year at Washington State University.

What is an Indian?

The professor’s name was Dr. Lawrence Crowell (don’t forget the doctorate!) and he was, according to his vita, a Cherokee-Choctaw-Seminole-Irish-Russian Indian from Hot Springs, Kentucky, or some such place.

“What is an Indian?” asked Dr. Crowell. He paced around the small room — there were twenty of us terrified freshmen — and looked each of us in the eyes. He was a small man, barely over five feet tall, with gray eyes and grayer hair.

“What is an Indian?” he asked me as he stood above me. I suppose he might have been trying to tower over me, but I was nearly as tall as he was even while sitting down, so that bit of body language failed to translate in his favor.

“Are you an Indian?” he asked me.

Of course I was. (Jesus, my black hair hung down past my ass and I was dark as a pecan!) I’d grown up on my reservation with my tribe. I understood most of the Spokane language, though I’d always spoken it like a Jesuit priest. Hell, I’d been in three car wrecks! And most important, every member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians could tell you the exact place and time where I’d lost my virginity. Why? Because I’d told each and every one of them. I mean, I knew the real names, nicknames, and secret names of every dog that had lived on my reservation during the last twenty years.

“Yeah, I’m Indian,” I said.

“What kind?” asked Dr. Crowell.

“Spokane.”

“And that’s all you are?”

“Yeah.”

“Your mother is Spokane?”

“Full-blood.”

“And your father as well?”

“Full-blood.”

“Really? Isn’t that rare for your tribe? I thought the Spokanes were very mixed.”

“Well, my dad once tried to make it with a Cherokee-Choctaw-Seminole-Irish-Russian, but poor guy, he just couldn’t get it up.”

My classmates laughed.

“You know,” I added. “My momma always used to tell me, those mixed-blood Indians, they just ain’t sexy enough.”

My classmates laughed even louder.

“Get out of my classroom,” Dr. Crowell said to me. “And don’t come back until you can show me some respect. I am your elder.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and left the room.

Of course, my mother’s opinion about the general desirability of mixed-blood Indians had been spoken mostly in jest. She had always been a funny woman.

“I mean, there’s so many sexy white guys in the world,” my mother had once told me. “There are white guys who like being white, and what’s not to like? They own everything. So, if you get the chance to sleep with a real white guy, especially one of them with a British accent or something, or Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, then why are you going to waste your time on some white guy who says he’s part Indian? Jeez, if I wanted to sleep with part-Indians, then I could do that at every powwow. Hell, I could get an orgy going with eight or nine of those Cherokees and maybe, just maybe, they would all add up to one real Indian.”

“And besides all that, listen to me, son,” she’d continued. “If your whole mission in life is to jump an Indian, then why not jump the Indian with the most Indian going on inside of him? And honey, believe me when I say that every last inch of your daddy is Indian.”

She’d laughed then and hugged me close. She’d always loved to talk nasty. For her, the telling of a dirty joke had always been the most traditional and sacred portion of any conversation.

“If I’m going after a penis only because it’s Indian,” my mother had said, “then it better be a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed, American Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, indigenous penis. Hey, I don’t want to get into some taste test, and realize one of these penises is Coke and the other one is Pepsi.”

Tears had rolled down her face as she’d laughed. At that moment, I loved her so much that I could barely breathe. I was twelve years old and she was teaching me about sex and all of its complications.

Her best piece of sexual advice: “Son, if you’re going to marry a white woman, then marry a rich one, because those white-trash women are just Indians with bad haircuts.”

The last thing she ever said to me: “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”