Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

When this book was first reviewed, people often commented on its autobiographical nature, and that always pissed me off.

“You see the description on the book,” I would say. “It says ‘Fiction.’ That’s what this book is.”

Of course, I was full of shit. This book is a thinly disguised memoir. I was a child at the crazy New Year’s Eve party depicted in “Every Little Hurricane.” My mother did punch another woman in the face during that party. My father and cousin did break through the basement door while playing full-contact Nerf basketball and roll down the stairs together. The best truth about that story is that my mother did stop drinking after that horrible night and has remained sober since. The worst truth? My father never did get sober. He was in residential treatment a few times, attended dozens of AA meetings, took Antabuse, made endless promises to his family and himself, but ended up on dialysis machines during his last years and lost a foot to diabetes before he passed away in March 2003. O my drunk and lovely father! He was one of the Indians who tossed his drunken friend onto the roller coaster in “Amusements.” How could one Indian have done such a thing to another Indian? I never asked my father why he did it, but I wrote a story about why I thought it happened, and even after my father read the story, I still didn’t have the courage to ask him why he did it. How lame is that?

What else is true? My best friend, Steve, and I traveled to Phoenix to pick up his father’s ashes just like Victor and Thomas do in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” though the fictional father was much more like my father than Steve’s. And yes, there was a flexible gymnast on the airplane during the trip who told Steve and me that she was the first alternate on the 1984 Olympic team. Is that woman out there somewhere? Does she remember two Indian guys sitting across from her on a Morris Air flight from Spokane through Salt Lake City to Phoenix?

A terrified mouse did run up my aunt’s pant leg, but I wildly exaggerated the aftermath in “The Fun House.” My aunt didn’t go swimming in the creek, never felt a need to divorce her husband or leave her son, and she was mad at me for suggesting otherwise.

“Junior,” she said. “People are going to think that really happened.”

“But it did really happen, Auntie. At least the mouse part. It’s a true story.”

“Yeah, but it’s truer when it’s in a book.”

“Indian Education” is a true (and truer) account of my public school days. I still have nightmares about missing those two free throws to lose that basketball game against Ritzville. Twenty years later, I can tell you that Doug Wellsandt, Ritzville’s star, had just fouled out after he intentionally knocked me to the ground to prevent me from hitting an easy layup. While I stood at the line to shoot the free throws with six seconds on the clock, Ritzville had Keith Humphrey, John Powers, Doug Koch, Miles Curtis, and Jeff McBroom on the court while my teammates — Steve LeBret, Shaun Soliday, John Graham, and Brett Springer — were praying for me to win the game. We had come from sixteen points down in the fourth quarter! It would have been a miracle victory! But I missed those fucking free throws, clanging the ball off the rim twice. Until that point, I had been a 90 percent free-throw shooter. After that night, I was a 50 percent loser. I was a victim of a high school basketball form of Post-Traumatic Free-Throw Stress Syndrome. When I see any of my former teammates now, they still tease me about losing that game. A year after those misses, I hit two free throws and two jump shots in the last minute to win a bigger game against Ritzville, but I never dream about that. Hell, my joy in winning is always much smaller than my pain in losing.

I’m a poet who can whine in meter.

And just like the father-son team in “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” my father and I once traveled to Spokane because the police wanted to talk to him about a long-missing and presumed dead Indian man. And yes, my father knew who killed and buried that man, as do most of the people on my reservation. The police know, too, but they can’t make a case against the killer. I see that man now and again. He’s soft-spoken, funny, and always wears slacks and button-down dress shirts. He once ate dinner at my house while I worried what he might do with his knife and fork. But that’s a whole different story, isn’t it?

So why am I telling you that these stories are true? First of all, they’re not really true. They are the vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain wrong. But in trying to make them true and real, I am writing what might be called reservation realism.

What is the definition of reservation realism? Well, I’ll let you read the book and figure that out for yourself.

As for me, in rereading these stories, some of them written when I was only nineteen years old, I feel like I’m listening to a stranger’s dreams. The younger version of me is angrier, more impulsive, and deathly afraid of physical description. Every dang Indian in this book is described as being identically dark skinned, with the same long black hair. It’s the Stepford Tribe of Indians. There might be five or six pine trees and a couple of rivers and streams, one grizzly bear and a lot of dogs, but that’s about all the flora and fauna you’re going to get. It’s simple stuff but manages to feel more concentrated rather than sparse. It’s funny, too. I laughed a few times at the old jokes, new to me after ten years. But mostly it feels sad, often hopeless, and hot with loneliness. I kept trying to figure out the main topic, the big theme, the overarching idea, the epicenter. And it is this: the sons in this book really love and hate their fathers.

ALTHOUGH IT WAS WINTER, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.

It was January and Victor was nine years old. He was sleeping in his bedroom in the basement of the HUD house when it happened. His mother and father were upstairs, hosting the largest New Year’s Eve party in tribal history, when the winds increased and the first tree fell.

“Goddamn it,” one Indian yelled at another as the argument began. “You ain’t shit, you fucking apple.”

The two Indians raged across the room at each other. One was tall and heavy, the other was short, muscular. High-pressure and low-pressure fronts.

The music was so loud that Victor could barely hear the voices as the two Indians escalated the argument into a fistfight. Soon there were no voices to be heard, only guttural noises that could have been curses or wood breaking. Then the music stopped so suddenly that the silence frightened Victor.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Victor’s father yelled, his voice coming quickly and with force. It shook the walls of the house.

“Adolph and Arnold are fighting again,” Victor’s mother said. Adolph and Arnold were her brothers, Victor’s uncles. They always fought. Had been fighting since the very beginning.

“Well, tell them to get their goddamn asses out of my house,” Victor’s father yelled again, his decibel level rising to meet the tension in the house.

“They already left,” Victor’s mother said. “They’re fighting out in the yard.”

Victor heard this and ran to his window. He could see his uncles slugging each other with such force that they had to be in love. Strangers would never want to hurt each other that badly. But it was strangely quiet, like Victor was watching a television show with the volume turned all the way down. He could hear the party upstairs move to the windows, step onto the front porch to watch the battle.