Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

SHE WANTED TO KNOW if I was Catholic.

I was completely unprepared to respond with any degree of clarity to such a dangerous question. After all, we had been talking about the shrimp appetizers (which were covered with an ambitious pesto sauce) and where they fit, in terms of quality, in our very separate histories of shrimp appetizers in particular and seafood appetizers in general. I’d just been describing to her how cayenne and lobster seemed to be mortal enemies, one of the more secular and inane culinary observations I’d ever made, when she’d focused her blue eyes on me, really looked at me for the first time in the one minute and thirty-five seconds we’d known each other, and asked me if I was Catholic.

How do you answer a question like that, especially when you’ve just met the woman at one of those house parties where you’d expected to know everybody in attendance but had gradually come to realize that you knew only the host couple, and then only well enough to ask about the welfare of the two kids (a boy and a girl or two boys) you thought they parented? As far as I could tell, there were no priests, ministers, or pastors milling about, so I had no easy visual aids in guessing at the dominant denomination in the room. If there’d been a Jesuit priest, Hasidic rabbi, or Tibetan monk drinking a pale ale over by the saltwater aquarium, I might have known the best response, the clever, scintillating answer that would have compelled her to take me home with her for a long night of safe and casual sex.

“Well,” she asked again, with a musical lilt in her voice. “Are you Catholic?”

Her left eye was a significantly darker blue than the right.

“Your eyes,” I said, trying to change the subject. “They’re different.”

“I’m blind in this one,” she said, pointing to the left eye.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, mortified by my lack of decorum.

“Why? It was my big brother who stabbed me with the pencil. He didn’t mean it, though.”

She told the story as if she’d only skinned a knee or received a slight concussion, as if the injury had been temporary.

“He was aiming for my little sister’s eye,” she added. “But she ducked. She was always more athletic than me.”

“Where’s your sister now?”

“She’s dead. Car wreck. Bang, bang, bang.”

So much pain for such a white woman. I wondered how often a man can say the wrong thing during the course of a particular conversation.

“What about your brother?” I asked, praying that he had not been driving the car that killed her sister.

“He’s right over there,” she said and pointed at a handsome man, taller than everybody else in the room, who was sitting on the carpeted stairs with a woman whose red hair I’d been admiring all evening. Though engaged in what appeared to be a passionate conversation, the brother sensed his sister’s attention and looked up. Both of his eyes were the same shade of blue as her good eye.

“He’s the one who did it,” she said and tapped her blind eye.

In response, the brother smiled and tapped his left eye. He could see perfectly.

“You cruel bastard,” she mouthed at him, though she made it sound like an affectionate nickname, like a tender legacy from childhood.

“You cruel bastard,” she repeated. Her brother could obviously read her lips because he laughed again, loud enough for me to hear him over the din of the party, and hugged the redhead in a tender but formal way that indicated they’d made love only three or four times in their young relationship.

“Your brother,” I said, trying to compliment her by complimenting the family genetics. “He’s good-looking.”

“He’s okay,” she said.

“He’s got your eyes.”

“Only one of them, remember,” she said and moved one step closer to me. “Now, quit trying to change the subject. Tell me. Are you Catholic or are you not Catholic?”

“Baptized,” I said. “But not confirmed.”

“That’s very ambiguous.”

“I read somewhere that many women think ambiguity is sexy.”

“Not me. I like men who are very specific.”

“You don’t like mystery?”

“I always know who did it,” she said and moved so close that I could smell the red wine and dinner mints on her breath.

I took a step back.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m not drunk. And I just chewed on a few Altoids because I thought I might be kissing somebody very soon.”

She could read minds. She was also drunk enough that her brother had already pocketed the keys to her Lexus.

“Who is this somebody you’re going to be kissing?” I asked. “And why just somebody? That sounds very ambiguous to me.”

“And very sexy,” she said and touched my hand. Blond, maybe thirty-five, and taller than me, she was the tenth most attractive white woman in the room. I always approached the tenth most attractive white woman at any gathering. I didn’t have enough looks, charm, intelligence, or money to approach anybody more attractive than that, and I didn’t have enough character to approach the less attractive. Crassly speaking, I’d always made sure to play ball only with my equals.

“You’re Indian,” she said, stretching the word into three syllables and nearly a fourth.

“Do you like that?”

“I like your hair,” she said, touching the black braids that hung down past my chest. I’d been growing the braids since I’d graduated from law school. My hair impressed jurors but irritated judges. Perfect.

“I like your hair, too,” I said and brushed a pale strand away from her forehead. I counted three blemishes and one mole on her face. I wanted to kiss the tips of her fingers. Women expected kisses on the parts of their bodies hidden by clothes, the private places, but were often surprised when I paid more attention to their public features: hands, hairline, the soft skin around their eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m just pretty. But pretty is good enough.”

I still didn’t know her name, but I could have guessed at it. Her generation of white women usually carried two-syllable names, like Becky, Erin, and Wendy, or monosyllabic nicknames that lacked any adornment. Peg, Deb, or Sam. Efficient names, quick-in-the-shower names, just-brush-it-and-go names. Her mother and her mother’s friends would be known by more ornate monikers, and if she had daughters, they would be named after their grandmothers. The country was filling up with little white girls named Rebecca, Elizabeth, and Willamena.

“Sara,” I guessed. “Your name is Sara.”

“With or without an h ?” she asked.

“Without,” I said, pleased with my psychic ability.

“Actually, it’s neither. My name is Susan. Susan McDermott. Without the h .”

“I’m Edgar Eagle Runner,” I said, though my driver’s license still read Edgar Joseph.

“Eagle Runner,” she repeated, feeling the shape of my name fill her mouth, then roll past her tongue, teeth, and lips.

“Susan,” I said.

“Eagle Runner,” she whispered. “What kind of Indian are you?”

“Spokane.”

“Never heard of it.”

“We’re a small tribe. Salmon people.”

“The salmon are disappearing,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they are.”

Susan McDermott and I were married in a small ceremony seven months later in St. Therese Catholic Church in Madrona, a gentrified neighborhood ten minutes from downtown Seattle. She’d been baptized at St. Therese as a toddler by a Jesuit who many years later went hiking on Mount Rainier and vanished. Father David or Joseph or Father Something Biblical. She didn’t remember anything about him, neither the color of his hair nor the exact shape of his theology, but she thought that his disappearance was a metaphor for her love life.