Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

I always wished we could have suited Norma up. She was taller than all of us and a better player than most of us. I don’t really remember her playing in high school, but people say she could have played college ball if she would’ve gone to college. Same old story. But the reservation people who say things like that have never been off the reservation.

“What’s it like out there?” Norma asked me when I came back from college, from the city, from cable television and delivered pizza.

“It’s like a bad dream you never wake up from,” I said, and it’s true. Sometimes I still feel like half of me is lost in the city, with its foot wedged into a steam grate or something. Stuck in one of those revolving doors, going round and round while all the white people are laughing. Standing completely still on an escalator that will not move, but I didn’t have the courage to climb the stairs by myself. Stuck in an elevator between floors with a white woman who keeps wanting to touch my hair.

There are some things that Indians would’ve never invented if given the chance.

“But the city gave you a son,” Norma said, and that was true enough. Sometimes, though, it felt like half a son because the city had him during the week and every other weekend. The reservation only got him for six days a month. Visitation rights. That’s how the court defined them. Visitation rights.

“Do you ever want kids?” I asked Norma.

“Yeah, of course,” she said. “I want a dozen. I want my own tribe.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Kind of. Don’t know if I want to raise kids in this world. It’s getting uglier by the second. And not just on the reservation.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “You see where two people got shot in the bus station in Spokane last week? In Spokane! It’s getting to be like New York City.”

“New York City enough.”

Norma was the kind of person who made you honest. She was so completely honest herself that you couldn’t help it. Pretty soon I’d be telling her all my secrets, the bad and good.

“What’s the worst thing you ever did?” she asked me.

“Probably that time I watched Victor beat the shit out of Thomas Builds-the-Fire.”

“I remember that. I’m the one who broke it up. But you were just a kid. Must be something worse than that.”

I thought about it awhile, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what the worst thing I ever did was.

It was at a basketball game when I was in college. I was with a bunch of guys from my dormitory, all white guys, and we were drunk, really drunk. The other team had this player who just got out of prison. I mean, this guy was about twenty-eight and had a tough life. Grew up in inner-city Los Angeles and finally made it out, made it to college and was playing and studying hard. If you think about it, he and I had a whole lot in common. Much more in common than I had with those white boys I was drunk with.

Anyway, when that player comes out, I don’t even remember his name or maybe I don’t want to remember it, we all start chanting at him. Really awful shit. Hateful. We all had these big cards we made to look like those GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards in Monopoly. One guy was running around in a black-and-white convict shirt with a fake ball-and-chain. It was a really bad scene. The local newspaper had a big write-up. We even made it into a People Magazine article. It was about that player and how much he’d gone through and how he still had to fight so much ignorance and hate. When they asked him how it felt during that game where we all went crazy, he said, It hurt .

After I told Norma that story, she was quiet for a long time. A long time.

“If I drank,” she said, “I would be getting drunk right about now because of that one.”

“I’ve gotten drunk on it a few times.”

“And if it still bothers you this much now,” Norma said, “then think how bad that guy feels about it.”

“I think about him all the time.”

After I told Norma that story, she treated me differently for about a year. She wasn’t mean or distant. Just different. But I understood. People can do things completely against their nature, completely. It’s like some tiny earthquake comes roaring through your body and soul, and it’s the only earthquake you’ll ever feel. But it damages so much, cracks the foundations of your life forever.

So I just figured Norma wouldn’t ever forgive me. She was like that. She was probably the most compassionate person on the reservation but she was also the most passionate. Then one day in the Trading Post she walked up to me and smiled.

“Pete Rose,” she said.

“What?” I asked, completely confused.

“Pete Rose,” she repeated.

“What?” I asked again, even more confused.

“That’s your new Indian name,” she said. “Pete Rose.”

“Why?”

“Because you two got a whole lot in common.”

“How?”

“Listen,” Norma said. “Pete Rose played major league baseball in four different decades, has more hits than anybody in history. Hell, think about it. Going back to Little League and high school and all that, he’s probably been smacking the ball around forever. Noah probably pitched him a few on the Ark. But after all that, all that greatness, he’s only remembered for the bad stuff.”

“Gambling,” I said.

“That ain’t right,” she said.

“Not at all.”

After that, Norma treated me the same as she did before she found out what I did in college. She made me try to find that basketball player, but I didn’t have any luck. What would I have told him if I did find him? Would I just tell him that I was Pete Rose? Would he have understood that?

Then, on one strange, strange day when a plane had to emergency land on the reservation highway, and the cooler in the Trading Post broke down and they were giving away ice cream because it would’ve been wasted, and a bear fell asleep on the roof of the Catholic church, Norma ran up to me, nearly breathless.

“Pete Rose,” she said. “They just voted to keep you out of the Hall of Fame. I’m sorry. But I still love you.”

“Yeah, I know, Norma. I love you, too.”

IN 1979 I WAS just learning how to be thirteen. I didn’t know that I’d have to keep thinking about it until I was twenty-five. I thought that once I figured out thirteen, then it was history, junk for the archaeologists to find years later. I thought it would keep working that way, figuring out each year as it came, then discarding it when the new one came along. But there’s much more to the whole thing. I mean, I had to figure out what it meant to be a boy, a man, too. Most of all, I had to find out what it meant to be Indian, and there ain’t no self-help manuals for that last one.

And of course, I had to understand what it meant when my father got a phone call one night out on the reservation.

“Who’s this?” my father asked when he picked the phone up. And it was the Secret Witness Program calling him from Spokane. Guess somebody turned my father’s name in to the police. Said my father might know something about how Jerry Vincent disappeared about ten years earlier.

So we had to drive into Spokane the next day, and all the way I was asking him questions like I was the family police.

“What happened to Jerry Vincent?” I asked him.

“He just disappeared. Nobody knows for sure.”

“If nobody knows what happened, then why do the police want to talk to you?”

“I was in the bar the night Jerry disappeared. Was partying a little bit with him. Guess that’s why.”

“Were you friends?”

“I guess. Yeah, we were friends. Mostly.”