Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

We drove that way, with me asking those questions, like how Jerry looked, how he talked, the way his clothes were wrinkled all the time. My father told me all those kind of things. About Jerry’s wife, his kids. About being disappeared.

“He wasn’t the first one to disappear like that. No way,” my father said.

“Who else?” I asked.

“Just about everybody at one time or another. All those relocation programs sent reservation Indians to the cities, and sometimes they just got swallowed up. Happened to me. I didn’t see or talk to anybody from home for a couple years.”

“Not even Mom?”

“I didn’t know her back then. Anyway, one day I come hitchhiking back to the reservation and everybody tells me they heard I was dead, heard I’d disappeared. Just like that.”

“Is that what happened to Jerry?”

“No, no. But I think everybody wanted it to be that way. Everybody wanted it that way because of the way it really happened.”

“What do you mean?”

My father put both hands on the steering wheel. A good thing, too. Just then we went into a slide on the icy road. A mean slide, a 360-degree slide around the worst corner in the Reardan Canyon. Why is it that car accidents take so long to happen? And they seem to get slower as you grow older? I’d been in one accident or another every year of my life. Just after I was born, my mother ran a red light and was hit broadside. I got thrown out of the car and landed in an open dumpster. Ever since that, my life has been punctuated by more accidents, all ugly and lucky. And all so slow.

Anyway, there we were, my father and I, silent as hell while the car fancydanced across the ice. At age thirteen, nobody thinks they’re going to die, so that wasn’t my worry. But my father was forty-one and that’s about the age that I figure a man starts to think about dying. Or starts to accept it as inevitable.

My father’s hands never left the wheel and he stared straight ahead, as if the world outside the window wasn’t completely revolving. He might as well have been watching television or a basketball game. It was happening. That’s all my father allowed himself to think.

But we didn’t wreck. Somehow the car turned completely around and we kept driving straight down the road as if the slide never took place. We didn’t talk about it right afterward and we don’t talk about it now. Does it exist? It’s like that idiot question about the tree falling in the woods. I’m always asking myself if a near-accident is an accident, if standing right next to a disaster makes you part of the disaster or just a neighbor.

We just kept driving. And talking.

“What happened to Jerry Vincent?” I asked.

“He got shot in the head in the alley behind the bar and they buried his body up in Manito Park.”

“Really? Do the police know that?”

“Yeah. I’ve told them quite a few times. I get called in about once a year, you know? And I always tell them the same thing. Yes, I was with Jerry that night. Yes, he was alive when I saw him last. Yeah, I know he was shot in the head in the alley behind the bar and they buried his body up in Manito Park somewhere. No, I don’t know who shot him, I just know the story because every Indian knows the story. No, I don’t know where the body is buried. No, I didn’t shoot him or bury him. I just had a few beers with him that night. Had quite a few beers with him over the years. That’s all.”

“You got the whole thing memorized, don’t you?”

“That’s how it works.”

We kept driving like that, driving that way, talking, asking questions, getting answers. It was snowing a little. The roads icy and dangerous.

From the reservation to Spokane is about an hour, through farming country, past Fairchild Air Force Base, and down into the valley. Because of the geography, Spokane has a lot of those air inversions, where this layer of filth hangs above the city and keeps everything trapped beneath it. The same bit of oxygen gets breathed over and over, passed through a hundred pair of lungs. It’s pretty horrible, worse even than Los Angeles, I guess. On that day we drove into Spokane, the air was brown and I don’t mean it looked brown. It was just brown, like breathing dirt directly. Like working in a coal mine.

“I’ve got mud in my mouth,” I said.

“Me, too,” my father said.

“It’d taste like this if I was buried alive, right?”

“I don’t know. That’s a pretty sick thought, enit?”

“Sick enough. What would it be like to die?”

“Don’t know. Ain’t ever died before.”

“Must be kind of like disappearing,” I said. “And you did disappear once.”

“Maybe,” my father said. “But disappearing ain’t always so bad. I knew one guy who traveled to some islands way out in the Pacific and got trapped there for two years because of some weird tides. There were no telephones, no radios, no way of contacting anybody. Everyone back home thought he had died. The local newspaper even ran an obituary. Then one day he gets off the island, flies back home, and walks in the front door just like that.”

“Really?”

“Really. And he said it was like starting over. Everybody was so goddamn happy to see him they forgot all about the bad things he did in the past. He said it was like being a newborn baby with everybody making funny noises in his face.”

We drove through city streets, familiar with them all. We saw those Indians passed out in doorways, staggering down the sidewalk. We knew most of them by sight, half of them by name.

“Hey,” my father said as we passed by an old Indian man. “That was Jimmy Shit Pants.”

“Ain’t seen him out on the reservation in a long time,” I said.

“How long?”

“A long time.”

We drove around the corner and came back to Jimmy. He wasn’t quite drunk, a few sips from it actually. He had on a little red coat that couldn’t have been warm enough for a Spokane winter. But he had some good boots. Probably got them from Goodwill or Salvation Army.

“Ya-hey, Jimmy,” my father said. “Nice boots.”

“Nice enough,” Jimmy said.

“What’s been going on?” my father asked.

“Not much.”

“Been drinking too hard?”

“Hard enough.”

“Hey, Jimmy,” I asked. “Why haven’t you been out on the reservation?”

“Don’t know. You got five bucks I can borrow?”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a dollar. It was all I had but I gave it up. Think about it this way. It was just a comic book and a Diet Pepsi for me. That ain’t nothing compared to what it meant to Jimmy. My father gave Jimmy a few bucks, too. Just enough for a jug.

We drove off then and left Jimmy to make his own decisions. That’s how it is. One Indian doesn’t tell another what to do. We just watch things happen and then make comments. It’s all about reaction as opposed to action.

“What time are you supposed to be at the police station?” I asked my father.

“About an hour.”

“Want to get something to eat?”

“Yeah.”

“How about a hamburger at Dick’s?”

“Sounds good, enit?”

“Good enough.”

So we drove on over to Dick’s, the greasy fast-food place with extra-cheap hamburgers. We ordered what we always ordered: a Whammy burger, large fries, and a Big Buy Diet Pepsi. We order Diet since my father and I are both diabetic. Genetics, you know?

Sometimes it does feel like we are all defined by the food we eat, though. My father and I would be potted meat product, corned beef hash, fry bread, and hot chili. We would be potato chips, hot dogs, and fried bologna. We would be coffee with grounds sticking in our teeth.

Sometimes there was no food in the house. I called my father Hunger and he called me Pang. You know how that is, don’t you?