Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

For the first time, William looked closely at the driver. He was clear-eyed and handsome, strong of shoulder and arm, maybe fifty years old, maybe older. A thick scar ran from his right ear down his neck and beneath his collar. A black man with a violent history, William thought and immediately reprimanded himself for racially profiling the driver: Excuse me, sir, but I pulled you over because your scar doesn’t belong in this neighborhood.

“I still think of my children as children,” the driver said. “But they are men now. Taller and stronger than me. They are older now than I was when I last saw them.”

William did the math and wondered how this driver could function with such fatherly pain. “I bet you can’t wait to go home and see them again,” he said, following the official handbook of the frightened American male: When confronted with the mysterious, you can defend yourself by speaking in obvious generalities.

“I cannot go home,” said the taxi driver, “and I fear I will never see them again.”

William didn’t want to be having this conversation. He wondered if his silence would silence the taxi driver. But it was too late for that.

“What are you?” the driver asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you are not white, your skin, it is dark like mine.”

“Not as dark as yours.”

“No,” said the driver and laughed. “Not so dark, but too dark to be white. What are you? Are you Jewish?”

Because they were so often Muslim, taxi drivers all over the world had often asked William if he was Jewish. William was always being confused for something else. He was ambiguously ethnic, living somewhere in the darker section of the Great American Crayola Box, but he was more beige than brown, more mauve than sienna.

“Why do you want to know if I’m Jewish?” William asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, ‘Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!’”

The taxi driver laughed again, and William laughed with him.

“I’m Indian,” William said.

“From India?”

“No, not jewel-on-the-forehead Indian,” said William. “I’m a bows-and-arrows Indian.”

“Oh, you mean ten little, nine little, eight little Indians?”

“Yeah, sort of,” said William. “I’m that kind of Indian, but much smarter. I’m a Spokane Indian. We’re salmon people.”

“In England, they call you Red Indians.”

“You’ve been to England?”

“Yes, I studied physics at Oxford.”

“Wow,” said William, wondering if this man was a liar.

“You are surprised by this, I imagine. Perhaps you think I’m a liar?”

William covered his mouth with one hand. He smiled this way when he was embarrassed.

“Aha, you do think I’m lying. You ask yourself questions about me. How could a physicist drive a taxi? Well, in the United States, I am a cabdriver, but in Ethiopia, I was a jet-fighter pilot.”

By coincidence or magic, or as a coincidence that could willfully be interpreted as magic, they drove past Boeing Field at that exact moment.

“Ah, you see,” said the taxi driver, “I can fly any of those planes. The prop planes, the jet planes, even the very large passenger planes. I can also fly the experimental ones that don’t fly. But I could make them fly because I am the best pilot in the world. Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” said William, very doubtful of this man but fascinated as well. If he was a liar, then he was a magnificent liar.

On both sides of the freeway, blue-collared men and women drove trucks and forklifts, unloaded trains, trucks, and ships, built computers, televisions, and airplanes. Seattle was a city of industry, of hard work, of calluses on the palms of hands. So many men and women working so hard. William worried that his job — his selling of the purely theoretical — wasn’t a real job at all. He didn’t build anything. He couldn’t walk into department and grocery stores and buy what he’d created, manufactured, and shipped. William’s life was measured by imaginary numbers: the binary code of computer languages, the amount of money in his bank accounts, the interest rate on his mortgage, and the rise and fall of the stock market. He invested much of his money in socially responsible funds. Imagine that! Imagine choosing to trust your money with companies that supposedly made their millions through ethical means. Imagine the breathtaking privilege of such a choice. All right, so maybe this was an old story for white men. For most of American history, who else but a white man could endure the existential crisis of economic success? But this story was original and aboriginal for William. For thousands of years, Spokane Indians had lived subsistence lives, using every last part of the salmon and deer because they’d die without every last part, but William only ordered salmon from menus and saw deer on television. Maybe he romanticized the primal — for thousands of years, Indians also died of ear infections — but William wanted his comfortable and safe life to contain more wilderness.

“Sir, forgive me for saying this,” the taxi driver said, “but you do not look like the Red Indians I have seen before.”

“I know,” William said. “People usually think I’m a longhaired Mexican.”

“What do you say to them when they think such a thing?”

“No habla español. Indio de Norteamericanos.”

“People think I’m black American. They always want to hip-hop rap to me. ‘Are you East Coast or West Coast?’ they ask me, and I tell them I am Ivory Coast.”

“How have things been since September eleventh?”

“Ah, a good question, sir. It’s been interesting. Because people think I’m black, they don’t see me as a terrorist, only as a crackhead addict on welfare. So I am a victim of only one misguided idea about who I am.”

“We’re all trapped by other people’s ideas, aren’t we?”

“I suppose that is true, sir. How has it been for you?”

“It’s all backward,” William said. “A few days after it happened, I was walking out of my gym downtown, and this big phallic pickup pulled up in front of me in the crosswalk. Yeah, this big truck with big phallic tires and a big phallic flagpole and a big phallic flag flying, and the big phallic symbol inside leaned out of his window and yelled at me, ‘Go back to your own country!’”

“Oh, that is sad and funny,” the taxi driver said.

“Yeah,” William said. “And it wasn’t so much a hate crime as it was a crime of irony, right? And I was laughing so hard, the truck was halfway down the block before I could get breath enough to yell back, ‘You first!’”

William and the taxi driver laughed and laughed together. Two dark men laughing at dark jokes.

“I had to fly on the first day you could fly,” William said. “And I was flying into Baltimore, you know, and D.C. and Baltimore are pretty much the same damn town, so it was like flying into Ground Zero, you know?”

“It must have been terrifying.”

“It was, it was. I was sitting in the plane here in Seattle, getting ready to take off, and I started looking around for suspicious brown guys. I was scared of little brown guys. So was everybody else. We were all afraid of the same things. I started looking around for big white guys because I figured they’d be undercover cops, right?”

“Imagine wanting to be surrounded by white cops!”

“Exactly! I didn’t want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?”