Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

And she laughed and I laughed, too. That’s what happened.

Norma was the world champion fry bread maker. Her fry bread was perfect, like one of those dreams you wake up from and say, I didn’t want to wake up .

“I think this is your best fry bread ever,” I told Norma one day. In fact, it was January 22.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now you get to wash the dishes.”

So I was washing the dishes when the phone rang. Norma answered it and I could hear her half of the conversation.

“Hello.”

“Yes, this is Norma Many Horses.”

“No.”

“No!”

“ No! ” Norma yelled as she threw the phone down and ran outside. I picked the receiver up carefully, afraid of what it might say to me.

“Hello,” I said.

“Who am I speaking to?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Jimmy Many Horses. I’m Norma’s husband.”

“Oh, Mr. Many Horses. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, uh, as I just told your wife, your mother-in-law, uh, passed away this morning.”

“Thank you,” I said, hung up the phone, and saw that Norma had returned.

“Oh, Jimmy,” she said, talking through tears.

“I can’t believe I just said thank you to that guy,” I said. “What does that mean? Thank you that my mother-in-law is dead? Thank you that you told me that my mother-in-law is dead? Thank you that you told me that my mother-in-law is dead and made my wife cry?”

“Jimmy,” Norma said. “Stop. It’s not funny.”

But I didn’t stop. Then or now.

Still, you have to realize that laughter saved Norma and me from pain, too. Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.

Once, a Washington State patrolman stopped Norma and me as we drove to Spokane to see a movie, get some dinner, a Big Gulp at 7-11.

“Excuse me, officer,” I asked. “What did I do wrong?”

“You failed to make proper signal for a turn a few blocks back,” he said.

That was interesting because I had been driving down a straight highway for over five miles. The only turns possible were down dirt roads toward houses where no one I ever knew had lived. But I knew to play along with his game. All you can hope for in these little wars is to minimize the amount of damage.

“I’m sorry about that, officer,” I said. “But you know how it is. I was listening to the radio, tapping my foot. It’s those drums, you know?”

“Whatever,” the trooper said. “Now, I need your driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance.”

I handed him the stuff and he barely looked at it. He leaned down into the window of the car.

“Hey, chief,” he asked. “Have you been drinking?”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

“How about your woman there?”

“Ask her yourself,” I said.

The trooper looked at me, blinked a few seconds, paused for dramatic effect, and said, “Don’t you even think about telling me what I should do.”

“I don’t drink, either,” Norma said quickly, hoping to avoid any further confrontation. “And I wasn’t driving anyway.”

“That don’t make any difference,” the trooper said. “Washington State has a new law against riding as a passenger in an Indian car.”

“Officer,” I said. “That ain’t new. We’ve known about that one for a couple hundred years.”

The trooper smiled a little, but it was a hard smile. You know the kind.

“However,” he said. “I think we can make some kind of arrangement so none of this has to go on your record.”

“How much is it going to cost me?” I asked.

“How much do you have?”

“About a hundred bucks.”

“Well,” the trooper said. “I don’t want to leave you with nothing. Let’s say the fine is ninety-nine dollars.”

I gave him all the money, though, four twenties, a ten, eight dollar bills, and two hundred pennies in a sandwich bag.

“Hey,” I said. “Take it all. That extra dollar is a tip, you know? Your service has been excellent.”

Norma wanted to laugh then. She covered her mouth and pretended to cough. His face turned red. I mean redder than it already was.

“In fact,” I said as I looked at the trooper’s badge. “I might just send a letter to your commanding officer. I’ll just write that Washington State Patrolman D. Nolan, badge number 13746, was polite, courteous, and above all, legal as an eagle.”

Norma laughed out loud now.

“Listen,” the trooper said. “I can just take you both in right now. For reckless driving, resisting arrest, threatening an officer with physical violence.”

“If you do,” Norma said and jumped into the fun, “I’ll just tell everyone how respectful you were of our Native traditions, how much you understood about the social conditions that lead to the criminal acts of so many Indians. I’ll say you were sympathetic, concerned, and intelligent.”

“Fucking Indians,” the trooper said as he threw the sandwich bag of pennies back into our car, sending them flying all over the interior. “And keep your damn change.”

We watched him walk back to his cruiser, climb in, and drive off, breaking four or five laws as he flipped a U-turn, left rubber, crossed the center line, broke the speed limit, and ran through a stop sign without lights and siren.

We laughed as we picked up the scattered pennies from the floor of the car. It was a good thing that the trooper threw that change back at us because we found just enough gas money to get us home.

After Norma left me, I’d occasionally get postcards from powwows all over the country. She missed me in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. I just stayed on the Spokane Indian Reservation and missed her from the doorway of my HUD house, from the living room window, waiting for the day that she would come back.

But that’s how Norma operated. She told me once that she would leave me whenever the love started to go bad.

“I ain’t going to watch the whole thing collapse,” she said. “I’ll get out when the getting is good.”

“You wouldn’t even try to save us?” I asked.

“It wouldn’t be worth saving at that point.”

“That’s pretty cold.”

“That’s not cold,” she said. “It’s practical.”

But don’t get me wrong, either. Norma was a warrior in every sense of the word. She would drive a hundred miles round-trip to visit tribal elders in the nursing homes in Spokane. When one of those elders died, Norma would weep violently, throw books and furniture.

“Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away,” she said. “And that hurts more because I don’t know how much of a future we have.”

And once, when we drove up on a really horrible car wreck, she held a dying man’s head in her lap and sang to him until he passed away. He was a white guy, too. Remember that. She kept that memory so close to her that she had nightmares for a year.

“I always dream that it’s you who’s dying,” she told me and didn’t let me drive the car for almost a year.

Norma, she was always afraid; she wasn’t afraid.

One thing that I noticed in the hospital as I coughed myself up and down the bed: A clock, at least one of those old-style clocks with hands and a face, looks just like somebody laughing if you stare at it long enough.

The hospital released me because they decided that I would be much more comfortable at home. And there I was, at home, writing letters to my loved ones on special reservation stationery that read: FROM THE DEATH BED OF JAMES MANY HORSES, III.

But in reality, I sat at my kitchen table to write, and DEATH TABLE just doesn’t have the necessary music. I’m also the only James Many Horses, but there is a certain dignity to any kind of artificial tradition.