Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

Of course, my mother would have felt only contempt for a man like Dr. Lawrence Crowell, not because he was a white man who wanted to be Indian (God! When it came right down to it, Indian was the best thing to be!), but because he thought he was entitled to tell other Indians what it meant to be Indian.

What is an Indian? Is it a son who brings his father to school as show-and-tell?

“Excuse me, sir,” Crowell said to my father as we both walked into the room. “Are you in my class?”

“Sweetheart,” said my father. “You’re in my class now.”

After that, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t need to say a word. My father sat at a desk, pulled out his false teeth, tucked them into his pants pocket, and smiled his black-hole smile the whole time. My father also wore a U.S. Army T-shirt that said Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. Of course, my father had never actually served in the military (He was a pacifist!) but he knew how to wield the idea of a gun.

“What is an Indian?” Crowell asked as he stood in front of the classroom.

My father raised his left hand.

“Anybody?” asked the professor.

With his hand high above his head, my father stood from his chair.

“Anybody?”

My father dropped his hand, walked up to the front, and stood directly in front of Crowell.

“Sir,” he said to my father. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Are you an Indian?”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

“I don’t know,” said my father. “Now, you may have some Indian blood. I can see a little bit of that aboriginal bone structure in your face, but you ain’t Indian. No. You might even hang out with some Indians. Maybe even get a little of the ha-ha when one of the women is feeling sorry for you. But you ain’t Indian. No. You might be a Native American but you sure as hell ain’t Indian.”

“Listen, I don’t have to take this from you. Do you want me to call security?”

“By the time security arrived, I could carefully insert your right foot deep into your own rectum.”

I hid my face and stifled my laughter. My father hadn’t been in a fistfight since sixth grade and she’d beaten the crap out of him.

“Are you an Indian?” my father asked again.

“I was at Alcatraz during the occupation.”

“That was, what, November ’69?”

“Yeah, I was in charge of communications. How about you?”

“I took my wife and kids to the Pacific Ocean, just off Neah Bay. Most beautiful place in the world.”

Though I’d been only three years old at the time, I remembered brief images of the water, the whales, and the Makah Indians who lived there in Neah Bay, or perhaps I had only stolen my memories, my images, from my father’s stories. In hearing his stories a thousand times over the years, had I unconsciously memorized them, had I colonized them and pretended they were mine? One theory: we can fool ourselves into believing any sermon if we repeat it enough times. Proof of theory: the number of times in his life the average human whispers Amen. What I know: I’m a liar. What I remember or imagine I remember: we stayed in Neah Bay during the off-season, so there were very few tourists, though tourists had rarely visited Neah Bay before or since that time, not until the Makahs had decided to resume their tradition of hunting whales. The tourists came because they wanted to see the blood. Everybody, white and Indian alike, wanted to see the blood.

What is an Indian? Is it a man with a spear in his hands?

“What about Wounded Knee?” Crowell asked my father. “I was at Wounded Knee. Where were you?”

“I was teaching my son here how to ride his bike. Took forever. And when he finally did it, man, I cried like a baby, I was so proud.”

“What kind of Indian are you? You weren’t part of the revolution.”

“I’m a man who keeps promises.”

It was mostly true. My father had kept most of his promises, or had tried to keep all of his promises, except this one: he never stopped eating sugar.

After we shared that dinner of homemade tomato soup, my father slept in his bed while I sat awake in the living room and watched the white noise of the television. My father’s kidneys and liver were beginning to shut down. Shut down. So mechanical. At that moment, if I had closed my eyes, I could have heard the high-pitched whine of my father’s engine (it was working too hard!) and the shudder of his chassis. In his sleep, he was climbing a hill (downshifting all the way!) and might not make it over the top.

At three that morning, I heard my father coughing, and then I heard him retching, gagging. I raced into his room, flipped on the light, and discovered him drenched in what I thought was blood.

“It’s the soup, it’s just the soup,” he said and laughed at the fear in my face. “I threw up the soup. It’s tomatoes, the tomatoes.”

I undressed him and washed his naked body. His skin had once been dark and taut, but it had grown pale and loose.

“You know how to get rid of tomato stains?” he asked.

“With carbonated water,” I said.

“Yeah, but how do you get rid of carbonated-water stains?”

I washed his belly, washed the skin that was blue with cold and a dozen tattoos. I washed his arms and hands. I washed his legs and penis.

“You shouldn’t have to do this,” he said, his voice cracking. “You’re not a nurse.”

What is an Indian? Is it a son who had always known where his father kept his clothes in neat military stacks?

I pulled a T-shirt over my father’s head. I slipped a pair of boxer shorts over his bandaged legs and up around his waist.

“How’s the bear?” I asked him, and he laughed until he gagged again, but there was nothing left in his stomach for him to lose. He was still laughing when I switched off the light, lay down beside him, and pulled the old quilt over us.

“You remember when I first made the tomato soup?” he asked me.

“Yeah, that summer at Ankeny’s.”

“The summer of Carla, as I recall.”

“I didn’t know you knew about her.”

“Jeez, you told everybody. That’s why she wouldn’t do it with you anymore. You hurt her feelings. You should have kept your mouth shut.”

“I had no idea.”

I wondered what would happen if I saw her again. Would she remember me with fondness or with regret?

“Before I threw up my soup, I was dreaming,” he said.

“About what?”

“I was dreaming there was a knock on the door and I got up and walked over there. I wasn’t walking on my stumps or anything. I was just sort of floating. And the knocking on the door was getting louder and louder. And I was getting mad, you know?”

I knew.

“And then I open up the door,” continued my father. “And I’m ready to yell, ready to shout, what the hell you want, right? But I don’t see anybody right away, until I look down, and there they are.”

“Your feet.”

“My feet.”

“Wow.”

“Wow, enit? Exactly. Wow. There’s my feet, my bare-ass feet just standing there on the porch.”

“They talked, enit?”

“Damn right, they talked. These little mouths opened up on the big toes, like some crazy little duet, and sang in Spanish.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“No, but they kept singing about Mexico.”

“You ever been to Mexico?”

“No. Never even been to California.”

I thought about my father’s opportunities and his failures, about the man he should have been and the man he had become. What is an Indian? Is it a man with a good memory? I thought about the pieces of my father — his children and grandchildren, his old shoes and unfinished novels — scattered all over the country. He was a man orphaned at six by his father’s soldierly death in Paris, France, and, three months later, by his mother’s cancerous fall in Spokane, Washington. I thought about my mother’s funeral and how my father had climbed into the coffin with her and how we, the stronger and weaker men of the family, had to pull him out screaming and kicking. I wondered if there was some kind of vestigial organ inside all of us that collected and stored our grief.