Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

“You pray for this?”

“Yes, William, I pray for this. And I pray for your safety on your trip, and I pray for the safety of your wife and daughter while you are gone.”

“Pop the trunk, I’ll get my own bags,” said William as he gave sixty dollars to Fekadu, exited the taxi, took his luggage out of the trunk, and slammed it shut. Then William walked over to the passenger-side window, leaned in, and studied Fekadu’s face and the terrible scar on his neck.

“Where did you get that?” William asked.

Fekadu ran a finger along the old wound. “Ah,” he said. “You must think I got this flying in a war. But no, I got this in a taxicab wreck. William, I am a much better jet pilot than a car driver.”

Fekadu laughed loudly and joyously. William wondered how this poor man could be capable of such happiness, however temporary it was.

“Your stories,” said William. “I want to believe you.”

“Then believe me,” said Fekadu.

Unsure, afraid, William stepped back.

“Good-bye, William American,” Fekadu said and drove away.

Standing at curbside, William couldn’t breathe well. He wondered if he was dying. Of course he was dying, a flawed mortal dying day by day, but he felt like he might fall over from a heart attack or stroke right there on the sidewalk. He left his bags and ran inside the terminal. Let a luggage porter think his bags were dangerous! Let a security guard x-ray the bags and find mysterious shapes! Let a bomb-squad cowboy explode the bags as precaution! Let an airport manager shut down the airport and search every possible traveler! Let the FAA president order every airplane to land! Let the American skies be empty of everything with wings! Let the birds stop flying! Let the very air go still and cold! William didn’t care. He ran through the terminal, searching for an available pay phone, a landline, something true and connected to the ground, and he finally found one and dropped two quarters into the slot and dialed his home number, and it rang and rang and rang and rang, and William worried that his wife and daughter were harmed, were lying dead on the floor, but then Marie answered.

“Hello, William,” she said.

“I’m here,” he said.

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1976, the city of Seattle was beginning to change from the barbarous seaport of loggers, sailors, and Indians it had always been into the progressive, computerized, and sanitized capital of all things Caucasian it would become. I was thirteen and pretty-skinny-beautiful, with eyelashes so black, long, and curly that grown women lost their minds and manners over me:

“Oh, why do boys always get the gorgeous eyelashes?”

“I’ll give you a million dollars for those eyelashes!”

“Hey, Sexy Eyes, why don’t you give me a call when you get legal.”

“Hello, Benjamin, my name is Mrs. Robinson.”

“Hey, let’s play Tonto and the Lone Ranger.”

My crazy aunt Bettina thought all of the female attention was going to make me gay, and though I loved a homoerotic circle jerk as much as the next curious teenage boy, I dreamed almost exclusively about girls and women.

Rules for Homoerotic Circle Jerks

Keep your hands to yourself.

You must open your eyes at least every thirty seconds, and you must keep them open at least thirty seconds at a time.

No making fun of larger or smaller penises.

Bring your own tissues for cleanup.

If you bring pornography, then you must share it.

You cannot fantasize about the girlfriends of the boys standing next to you, but you can fantasize about the girlfriends of every other boy in the circle.

You can fantasize about any of the boys in the circle jerk, but not if they are standing next to you.

An official circle jerk contains seven boys.

If fewer than seven boys want to jerk off together, they must stand in single file, and it shall be known as a firing line.

If more than seven boys want to jerk off together, it shall be called a Joint Session of Congress.

My head was filled with a disassociated and constantly running montage of vaginas and breasts; I was the Andy Warhol of self-imagined adolescent porn. And yes, even at thirteen years of age, I knew about Andy Warhol’s work and found it so completely of its time that I guessed his deconstructive painting of Campbell’s soup cans would eventually be used as a paid advertisement for Campbell’s soup.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: It was my mother who first advanced that particular anti-Warholian theory, and she might have read it first somewhere else. But she is a powerful Indian who reads art-theory books, so I listen to her, and I often agree with her criticism.

My mother was super smart, and I was smart by osmosis. But she was born smart on the Spokane Indian Reservation and studied her way into the University of Washington during a time when she was pretty much the only Indian on campus, aside from two Snohomish janitors and a Yakama cook at one of the dorms. It’s tough to be a smart girl anywhere, but it’s way tough on the rez.

Q: What’s the difference between an Indian reservation and a racist, sexist, homophobic, white-trash logging town populated entirely with the mutated children of married second cousins?

A: The Indians have braids.

If you think about it, my mother was as heroic as Thor Heyerdahl, Sir Edmund Hillary, John Glenn, or any of those white-boy explorers. My mother broke speed limits, climbed mountains, and sailed oceans nobody else had dreamed up. And she did it all by herself, with one hand holding a textbook and the other hand holding a squealing baby ( me! ) to her breast. Maybe I’m smart because my mother’s breast milk had little pieces of Albert Einstein and Madame Curie floating around in it. As for my father, he was so long gone that my mother and I called him Long Gone and told each other bedtime stories that always ended with him getting eaten by wild dogs.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: I greatly missed my father and only pretended to hate him as much as my mother did.

My mother and I lived in a two-bedroom rental house in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle. We were poor, but anybody can afford fruits and vegetables, and that’s what we ate. I wasn’t a vegetarian by choice; I was a vegetarian by economic circumstance.

On July 5 (I remember the exact day because I remember the acrid smell of leftover fireworks smoke), my mother and I were shopping in the local free-range, whole-wheat, lactose-intolerant co-op when she picked up a hand-stapled magazine and self-administered a parenting quiz:

Do you know the names of all of your child’s friends?

Do you give your child gender-neutral gifts?

When your child cries, what color are you thinking of?

Are you fully clothed, partially clothed, or nude when you breast-feed your baby?

What are you teaching your child about peace and justice?

Have you taught your child to play a musical instrument?

Do you heart-listen to your child?

Despite her roving and restless intelligence, my mother was the kind of person who believed the garbage she read in magazines. We all have our blind spots, I suppose. She was distrustful enough to write a master’s thesis titled “John F. Kennedy’s Murder: How Rich Men Tell One Lie for Each Dollar They’re Worth,” but she still believed in astrology. She was genuinely shocked and hurt when she caught another human being lying to her, which meant she lived in a constant state of painful surprise, but oh, she would violently punish those liars by screaming surrealistic curses:

“Your great-grandfather starred in silent porno movies!”

“Gravity was invented to keep you from realizing your dreams!”