Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

Sharon went to St. Therese’s School for Girls. Her parents, Wilson and Pauline, were both architects; they helped build three of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. If Zeus ate a few million pounds of glass, steel, and concrete, his offal would look something like those buildings. However fecal, those monstrosities won awards and made Wilson and Pauline very popular and wealthy. They lived in a self-designed home on Lake Washington that was lovely and tasteful in all ways except for its ridiculously turquoise exterior. I don’t know whether they painted the house turquoise to honor the sacred stone of the Southwest or if they were being ironic: Ha! We’re Apache Indians from the desert, and this is our big blue house on the water! Deal with it!

Sharon and I were Native American royalty, the aboriginal prince and princess of western Washington. Sure, we’d been thoroughly defeated by white culture, but dang it, we were conquered and assimilated National Merit Scholars in St. Junior’s English honors department.

Sharon and I were in love and happy and young and skinny and beautiful and hyperliterate. We recited Shakespeare monologues as foreplay: To be or not to be, take off your panties, oh, Horatio, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, I’m going to wear your panties now. All over campus, we were known as Sharon-and-David-the-Bohemian-Indians. We were inseparable. We ate our meals together and fed each other. Risking expulsion for moral violations, we sneaked into each other’s dorm rooms at night and made love while our respective roommates covered their heads with pillows. Sharon and I always tried to take the same classes and mourned the other’s absence whenever we couldn’t. We read the same books and discussed them while we were naked and intertwined. Oh Lord, we were twins conjoined at the brain, heart, and crotch.

I proposed to Sharon on the first day of our senior year, and she accepted, and we planned to secretly elope on the day after our graduation.

In June, the day before graduation, Sharon and I were taking one last walk along the path beside the anonymous creek that ran through the middle of campus. We were saying good-bye to a good place. Overgrown with fern and blackberry thickets, the creek had been left wild and wet.

“‘Whose woods these are I think I know’,” I said.

“Robert Frost wrote the poem,” said Sharon. We were playing Name the Poet, a game of our own invention.

“‘Know’ and ‘poem,’” I said. “A clumsy rhyme, don’t you think?”

“You stink,” she said and laughed too loudly. Her joy was always rowdy, rude, and pervasive. I laughed with her and pulled her close to me and pressed my face into her hair and breathed in her scent. After the first time we’d made love, she’d said, Now I know what you smell like, and no matter what else happens to us, I’m always going to know what you smell like.

“Hey,” I said as we walked the creek. “How about we climb into the bushes and I get you a little wild and wet?”

We kissed and kissed until she pulled away.

“Do you hear that?” she said.

“What?”

“I think it’s a cat. Can you hear it meowing?”

I listened and heard nothing.

“You’re imagining things,” I said.

“No, it’s a cat. I can hear it. It sounds pitiful.”

“There must be a hundred cats around here. City cats. They’re tough.”

“No, it sounds hurt. Listen.”

I listened and finally heard the faint feline cry.

“It’s down there in the creek somewhere,” she said.

We peered over the edge and could barely see the water through the thick and thorny overgrowth.

“I’m sure it’s hunting rats or something,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“No, listen to it. It’s crying. I think it’s stuck.”

“What do you want me to do? It’s just a dumb-ass cat.”

“Can you go find it?”

I looked again at the jungle between that cat and me.

“I’d need a machete to get through there,” I said.

“Please,” said Sharon.

“I’m going to get all cut up.”

“‘All in green went my love riding,’” she whispered in that special way, “‘on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.’”

“Cummings wrote the poem, and I’m in love and gone,” I said and made my slow way down the creek side. I didn’t want to save the cat; I wanted to preserve Sharon’s high opinion of me. If she hadn’t been there to push me down the slope, I never would have gone after that cat. As it was, I cursed the world as I tripped over ferns and pushed blackberry branches out of the way. I was cut and scraped and threatened by spiders and wasps, all for a dumb cat.

“It’s like Wild Kingdom down here,” I said.

“Do you see him?” she said, more worried about the cat. I could hear the love in her voice. I was jealous of that damn cat!

I stopped and listened. I heard the cry from somewhere close.

“He’s right around here,” I said.

“Find him,” she said, her voice choking with fierce tears.

I leaned over, pushed aside one last fern, and saw him, a black cat trapped in blackberry branches. He was starved, too skinny to be alive, I thought, but his eyes were bright with fear and pain.

“Man,” I said. “I think he’s been caught in here for a long time.”

“Save him, save him.”

I reached in, expecting the cat to bite or claw me, but he remained gratefully passive as I tore away the branches and freed him. I lifted and carried him back up the bank. He was dirty and smelly, and I wanted all of this to be over.

“Oh my God,” said Sharon as she took him from me. “Oh, he’s so sad, so sad.” She hugged him, and he accepted it without protest.

“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t keep him,” I said. “Let’s let him go here. He’s free now. He’ll be okay.”

“What if he gets stuck again?”

“Then it’ll be natural selection. Come on, he doesn’t have a tag or anything. He’s just a stray cat.”

“No, he’s tame, he’s got a home somewhere.” She stared the cat in the eyes as if he could tell us his phone number and address.

“Oh, wait, wait,” she said. “I remember, in the newspaper, last week or something, there was a lost-cat ad. It said he was black with white heart-shaped fur on his belly.”

Sharon had a supernatural memory; she could meet a few dozen new people at a party and rattle off their names two days later. During an English-department party our sophomore year, she recited by memory seventy-three Shakespeare sonnets in a row. It was the most voluminous display of erudition any of us had ever witnessed. Tenured English professors wept. But I was the one who enjoyed the honor and privilege of taking her home that night and making her grunt in repetitive monosyllables.

Beside the creek, Sharon gently turned the cat over, and we both saw the white heart. Without another word, Sharon ran back to her dorm room, and I followed her. She searched for the newspaper in her desk but couldn’t find it, and none of her floormates had a copy of the old paper, either, so she ran into the basement and climbed into the Dumpster. I held the cat while she burrowed into the fetid pile of garbage.

“Come on,” I said. “You’re never going to find it. Maybe you imagined the whole thing. Let’s take him to the shelter. They can take care of him.”

She ignored me and kept searching. I felt like throwing the cat into the wall.

“This is it,” she said and pulled a greasy newspaper out of the mess. She flipped to the classifieds, found the lost-cat ad, and shouted out the phone number. She jumped out of the Dumpster, grabbed the cat, ran back to her room, and quickly dialed.