Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

At first I just shot baskets by myself. It was selfish, and I also wanted to learn the game again before I played against anybody else. Since I had been good before and embarrassed fellow tribal members, I knew they would want to take revenge on me. Forget about the cowboys versus Indians business. The most intense competition on any reservation is Indians versus Indians.

But on the night I was ready to play for real, there was this white guy at the gym, playing with all the Indians.

“Who is that?” I asked Jimmy Seyler.

“He’s the new BIA chief’s kid.”

“Can he play?”

“Oh, yeah.”

And he could play. He played Indian ball, fast and loose, better than all the Indians there.

“How long’s he been playing here?” I asked.

“Long enough.”

I stretched my muscles, and everybody watched me. All these Indians watched one of their old and dusty heroes. Even though I had played most of my ball at the white high school I went to, I was still all Indian, you know? I was Indian when it counted, and this BIA kid needed to be beaten by an Indian, any Indian.

I jumped into the game and played well for a little while. It felt good. I hit a few shots, grabbed a rebound or two, played enough defense to keep the other team honest. Then that white kid took over the game. He was too good. Later, he’d play college ball back East and would nearly make the Knicks team a couple years on. But we didn’t know any of that would happen. We just knew he was better that day and every other day.

The next morning I woke up tired and hungry, so I grabbed the want ads, found a job I wanted, and drove to Spokane to get it. I’ve been working at the high school exchange program ever since, typing and answering phones. Sometimes I wonder if the people on the other end of the line know that I’m Indian and if their voices would change if they did know.

One day I picked up the phone and it was her, calling from Seattle.

“I got your number from your mom,” she said. “I’m glad you’re working.”

“Yeah, nothing like a regular paycheck.”

“Are you drinking?”

“No, I’ve been on the wagon for almost a year.”

“Good.”

The connection was good. I could hear her breathing in the spaces between our words. How do you talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted you? How do you tell the difference between the two?

“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

“Me, too.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked her and wished I had the answer for myself.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to change the world.”

These days, living alone in Spokane, I wish I lived closer to the river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump. I wish I could sleep. I put down my paper or book and turn off all the lights, lie quietly in the dark. It may take hours, even years, for me to sleep again. There’s nothing surprising or disappointing in that.

I know how all my dreams end anyway.

THE TELEVISION WAS ALWAYS loud, too loud, until every conversation was distorted, fragmented.

“Dinner” sounded like “Leave me alone.”

“I love you” sounded like “Inertia.”

“Please” sounded like “Sacrifice.”

Believe me, the television was always too loud. At three in the morning I woke from ordinary nightmares to hear the television pounding the ceiling above my bed. Sometimes it was just white noise, the end of another broadcasting day. Other times it was a bad movie made worse by the late hour and interrupted sleep.

“Drop your weapons and come out with your hands above your head” sounded too much like “Trust me, the world is yours.”

“The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming!” sounded too much like “Just one more beer, sweetheart, and then we’ll go home.”

“Junior, I lost the money” sounded too much like “You’ll never have a dream come true.”

I don’t know where all the years went. I remember only the television in detail. All the other moments worth remembering became stories that changed with each telling, until nothing was aboriginal or recognizable.

For instance, in the summer of 1972 or 1973 or only in our minds, the reservation disappeared. I remember standing on the front porch of our HUD house, practicing on my plastic saxophone, when the reservation disappeared.

Finally , I remember thinking, but I was six years old, or seven. I don’t know for sure how old; I was Indian.

Just like that, there was nothing there beyond the bottom step. My older brother told me he’d give me a quarter if I jumped into the unknown. My twin sisters cried equal tears; their bicycles had been parked out by the pine trees, all of it vanished.

My mother came out to investigate the noise. She stared out past the bottom step for a long time, but there was no expression on her face when she went back to wash the potatoes.

My father was happily drunk and he stumbled off the bottom step before any of us could stop him. He came back years later with diabetes and a pocketful of quarters. The seeds in the cuffs of his pants dropped to the floor of our house and grew into orange trees.

“Nothing is possible without Vitamin C,” my mother told us, but I knew she meant to say, “Don’t want everything so much.”

Often the stories contain people who never existed before our collective imaginations created them.

My brother and I remember our sisters scraped all the food that dropped off our plates during dinner into a pile in the center of the table. Then they placed their teeth against the edge of the table and scraped all the food into their open mouths.

Our parents don’t remember that happening, and our sisters cry out, “No, no, we were never that hungry!”

Still, my brother and I cannot deny the truth of our story. We were there. Maybe hunger informs our lives.

My family tells me stories of myself, small events and catastrophic diseases I don’t remember but accept as the beginning of my story.

After surgery to relieve fluid pressure on my brain, I started to dance.

“No,” my mother tells me. “You had epileptic seizures.”

“No,” my father tells her. “He was dancing.”

During “The Tonight Show” I pretended sleep on the couch while my father sat in his chair and watched the television.

“It was Doc’s trumpet that made you dance,” my father told me.

“No, it was grand mal seizures punctuated by moments of extreme perception,” my mother told him.

She wanted to believe I could see the future. She secretly knew the doctors had inserted another organ into my skull, transplanted a twentieth-century vision.

One winter she threw me outside in my underwear and refused to let me back into the house until I answered her questions.

“Will my children love me when I’m old?” she asked, but I knew she wanted to ask me, “Will I regret my life?”

Then there was music, scratched 45’s and eight-track tapes. We turned the volume too high for the speakers, until the music was tinny and distorted. But we danced, until my oldest sister tore her only pair of nylons and wept violently. But we danced, until we shook dust down from the ceiling and chased bats out of the attic into the daylight. But we danced, in our mismatched clothes and broken shoes. I wrote my name in Magic Marker on my shoes, my first name on the left toe and my last name on the right toe, with my true name somewhere in between. But we danced, with empty stomachs and nothing for dinner except sleep. All night we lay awake with sweat on our backs and blisters on our soles. All night we fought waking nightmares until sleep came with nightmares of its own. I remember the nightmare about the thin man in a big hat who took the Indian children away from their parents. He came with scissors to cut hair and a locked box to hide all the amputated braids. But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.