Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“Where is everything?” Victor had asked more than once.

Now when Thomas was finally driving they saw the first animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was a long-eared jackrabbit.

“Look,” Victor yelled. “It’s alive.”

Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating themselves on their discovery when the jackrabbit darted out into the road and under the wheels of the pickup.

“Stop the goddamn car,” Victor yelled, and Thomas did stop, backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.

“Oh, man, he’s dead,” Victor said as he looked at the squashed animal.

“Really dead.”

“The only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed it.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it was suicide.”

Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.

“Yeah,” Victor said. “It had to be suicide.”

“I can’t believe this,” Thomas said. “You drive for a thousand miles and there ain’t even any bugs smashed on the windshield. I drive for ten seconds and kill the only living thing in Nevada.”

“Yeah,” Victor said. “Maybe I should drive.”

“Maybe you should.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire walked through the corridors of the tribal school by himself. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near him because of all those stories. Story after story.

Thomas closed his eyes and this story came to him: “We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War II, died fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for years. My mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was still inside her. She pushed me out into the world with her last breath. I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories which came to me before I even had the words to speak. I learned a thousand stories before I took my first thousand steps. They are all I have. It’s all I can do.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire told his stories to all those who would stop and listen. He kept telling them long after people had stopped listening.

Victor and Thomas made it back to the reservation just as the sun was rising. It was the beginning of a new day on earth, but the same old shit on the reservation.

“Good morning,” Thomas said.

“Good morning.”

The tribe was waking up, ready for work, eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, just like everybody else does. Willene LeBret was out in her garden wearing a bathrobe. She waved when Thomas and Victor drove by.

“Crazy Indians made it,” she said to herself and went back to her roses.

Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s HUD house. They both yawned, stretched a little, shook dust from their bodies.

“I’m tired,” Victor said.

“Of everything,” Thomas added.

They both searched for words to end the journey. Victor needed to thank Thomas for his help, for the money, and make the promise to pay it all back.

“Don’t worry about the money,” Thomas said. “It don’t make any difference anyhow.”

“Probably not, enit?”

“Nope.”

Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy storyteller who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine trees. Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas, even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it was real. As real as the ashes, as Victor’s father, sitting behind the seats.

“I know how it is,” Thomas said. “I know you ain’t going to treat me any better than you did before. I know your friends would give you too much shit about it.”

Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams. He owed Thomas something, anything.

“Listen,” Victor said and handed Thomas the cardboard box which contained half of his father. “I want you to have this.”

Thomas took the ashes and smiled, closed his eyes, and told this story: “I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and toss these ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home. It will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a rainbow. He will rise, Victor, he will rise.”

Victor smiled.

“I was planning on doing the same thing with my half,” Victor said. “But I didn’t imagine my father looking anything like a salmon. I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something. Like letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.”

“Nothing stops, cousin,” Thomas said. “Nothing stops.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and walked up his driveway. Victor started the pickup and began the drive home.

“Wait,” Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. “I just got to ask one favor.”

Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and shouted back. “What do you want?”

“Just one time when I’m telling a story somewhere, why don’t you stop and listen?” Thomas asked.

“Just once?”

“Just once.”

Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever wanted from his whole life. So Victor drove his father’s pickup toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.

IN THE TRAILER BY Tshimikain Creek where my cousins and I used to go crazy in the mud, my aunt waited. She sewed to pass the time, made beautiful buckskin outfits that no one could afford, and once she made a full-length beaded dress that was too heavy for anyone to wear.

“It’s just like the sword in the stone,” she said. “When a woman comes along who can carry the weight of this dress on her back, then we’ll have found the one who will save us all.”

One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt’s sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.

She pulled her body into the air, reached down her pants, unbuttoned them, tried to pull them off, but they stuck around the hips.

“Jesus, Jesus,” she cried while her husband and son rolled with laughter on the floor.

“Get it out, get it out,” she yelled some more while her husband ran over and smacked her legs in an effort to smash the mouse dead.

“Not that way,” she cried again and again.

All the noise and laughter and tears frightened the mouse even more, and he ran down my aunt’s pant leg, out the door and into the fields.

In the aftermath, my aunt hiked her pants back up and cursed her son and husband.

“Why didn’t you help me?” she asked.

Her son couldn’t stop laughing.

“I bet when that mouse ran up your pant leg, he was thinking, What in the hell kind of mousetraps do they got now? ” her husband said.

“Yeah,” her son agreed. “When he got up there, he probably said to himself, That’s the ugliest mousetrap I’ve ever seen! ”

“Stop it, you two,” she yelled. “Haven’t you got any sense left?”

“Calm down,” my uncle said. “We’re only teasing you.”

“You’re just a couple of ungrateful shits,” my aunt said. “Where would you be if I didn’t cook, if my fry bread didn’t fill your stomachs every damn night?”

“Momma,” her son said. “I didn’t mean it.”