Sherman Alexie: Flight

I don’t understand what has happened. I survived a bullet to the brain. And I’m in a motel room with a cop.

“Where am I?” I ask the cop.

“We’ll both be in a shit storm if we miss this meeting. We fell asleep. Come on. Get up, get your stuff, and let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“Jeez, Hank, shake the sleep out of your brain and get moving.”

Hank? Did he just call me Hank?

“My name isn’t Hank,” I say.

“Quit fooling around, Hank, you’re getting me mad.”

“Quit calling me Hank.”

The cop stands and walks over to me. He leans over me and stares hard at me. His breath smells like beer and onions.

Yes, I’ve had quite a few ugly smelly guys lean over my bed. I get the urge to punch this cop in the crotch.

“Are you still asleep?” he asks.

“No.”

“You’re in one of them waking dreams, aren’t you?” he asks. “Like sleepwalking or something, right?”

He slaps my cheek lightly. Then slaps me harder.

“Did that help, Hank?” he asks.

“You call me Hank one more time,” I say, “and I’m going to kick your ass.”

He laughs, pulls me off the bed and to my feet, and shoves me across the room. I trip over a pair of shoes and bump the back of my head against a mirror.

“That’s police brutality!” I shout.

The cop just laughs. I’ve always been good at making cops laugh. But I’m not trying to be funny this time.

“I just got shot in the brain,” I say. “Are you trying to kill me?”

He laughs again, grabs a holstered pistol off the table, and hands it to me.

“Okay, soldier up, funny guy,” he says. “We got real work to do.”

I am stunned. I am the psycho teen who shot up a bank filled with people and a cop just handed me a gigantic freakin’ gun! A.357 Magnum! At least, I think it’s a Magnum. I don’t know guns much, but I’ve seen this one in the movies.

I turn around to look at myself in the mirror. I expect to see me pretending to be Clint Eastwood. But instead I am looking at a face that is not my own.

Huh. Isn’t that something?

They must have done plastic surgery on me. That bullet must have taken off my face. And so they had to take my zitty teenage Indian mug and replace it with a handsome white guy’s face.

Yes, I am looking at a very handsome white guy in the mirror. His hair is blond. His eyes are blue. His skin is clear. This guy hasn’t had a zit in his whole life. And this guy is me.

Isn’t modern medicine amazing?

“Wow,” I say to the cop. “I really like my new face.”

He just stares at me.

“It’s like that movie with John Travolta,” I say. “The one where he switches faces with Nicolas Cage. I didn’t know that stuff was real.”

The cop’s face changes expression. All of a sudden he looks a little confused. And worried. “Did you have a stroke or something, Hank?” he asks. “You’re not talking or looking right.”

I can’t figure out why he keeps calling me Hank. Well, maybe they changed my face and my name. And so I look down and realize I am shorter than I used to be. In fact, I realize I’m about six or seven inches shorter than I used to be. I’m a short guy now, but I have a lot more muscles. My arms are huge. I have the face and body of a bodybuilder white guy. I am beautiful.

Jeez, I should get shot in the brain every day.

I suddenly get an idea. I reach down and check the size of my groinal region, and I realize that I’m different down there, too. I am a big guy in all sorts of ways.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the cop asks me. “I’m calling this off if you’re not okay. It’s too dangerous if you’re not okay.”

“No, no, no,” I say. “Everything is good.”

Of course, I’m lying. I don’t know that everything is good. I am very confused.

“Tell me you’re okay,” the cop says. “We’re not leaving this room unless you say you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” I say.

He believes me.

“Good. Good, partner, let’s go kick some butt,” the cop says, and tosses me a wallet. My wallet. I open it up and see a gold badge. My badge. And then I pull an ID card out of the wallet and look at the photo. It’s me.

Well, it’s a picture of a guy with my new white face. But that ID says that this face belongs to a guy named Hank Storm, and that he’s thirty-five years old, and that he’s an FBI agent. Yep, a federal agent. A supercop.

“I’m Hank Storm?” I ask the other cop, who must be an FBI guy, too.

“Yes,” he says. “You’re finally awake. Jeez, Hank, you really had me worried there. All right, let’s go save the world.”

I put on my shoes and follow him out the door.

THE OTHER FBI DUDE and I step out of our motel room. It’s dark and clear and I can see stars in the sky. More stars than I’ve ever seen. I also see a sign that says this is the Red River Motor Inn.

Red River, Red River, Red River; that name is so familiar. I think I read about it somewhere. And then I remember. Red River is on the Nannapush Indian Reservation.

“Red River, Idaho,” I say.

“Yep,” the other FBI says. “The asshole of America.”

“Lot of Indians here.”

“Yeah. I wish Custer would have killed a few more of these damn tepee creepers.”

“Wow,” I say. “You really hate Indians, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know any Indians until they sent me to work here. And then I met Indians. And trust me, none of them is worth much. Well, maybe some of the kids. Some of the kids are still okay. But they’re going to go bad, too. Just you watch. There’s something bad inside these Indians. They can’t help themselves.”

I wonder what this racist FBI man would do if he knew his partner was really a half-breed Indian. I want to tell him, but I don’t want to get punched. Or shot in the head. Again.

So I keep quiet. As quiet as this reservation.

I look at the map inside my memory and realize I’m six hundred miles from the nearest real city. And there are so many stars. I know city lights but I don’t know stars.

“The sky is beautiful,” I say. “Like a starry blanket.”

The other FBI laughs and laughs. “Jeez,” he says. “You go to sleep a killer and you wake up like some kind of poet.”

“I’m a killer poet,” I say.

The other FBI loves that. He slaps me hard on the back, but it doesn’t hurt at all because I am very muscular.

“What time is it anyway?” I ask.

“Three in the morn,” the other FBI says. “We have to hurry.”

So we get into the government sedan and the other FBI drives us through a maze of dirt roads to an old shack sitting out the middle of a dark nowhere. It’s so dark I can’t see more than four or five feet away. It’s like being in the belly of a whale.

“I bet you can’t get cell phone reception out here,” I say.

“What’s a cell phone?” the other FBI asks.

It’s my turn to laugh.

“Is the FBI too cheap to give cell phones to its agents?” I ask.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

Wow, this guy isn’t kidding. He doesn’t know about cell phones. I guess he’s old-fashioned. I want to ask him if he’s heard of electricity.

Then I see headlights coming down the road behind us.

“All right, all right, get your game face on, kid,” says the other FBI. “Things could get ugly real quick.”

He pulls out his pistol and checks the ammo.

“Are we going to have a gunfight?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says.

So I pull out my pistol and check the ammo. Okay, I think, I have to be in some kind of dream. This can’t be real. I cannot be getting ready for a gunfight. I’m excited and scared. And then I realize something.