Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues

So Thomas went home and tried to write their first song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for the song. He waited and waited. It’s nearly impossible to write a song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn’t know that. He’d never written a song before.

“Please,” Thomas prayed.

But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. He turned on the television and watched The Sound of Music on channel four. Julie Andrews put him to sleep for the seventy-sixth time, and neither story nor song came in his dreams. After he woke up, he paced around the room, stood on his porch, and listened to those faint voices that echoed all over the reservation. Everybody heard those voices, but nobody liked to talk about them. They were loudest at night, when Thomas tried to sleep, and he always thought they sounded like horses.

For hours, Thomas waited for the song. Then, hungry and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and discovered that he didn’t have any food. So he closed the fridge and opened it again, but it was still empty. In a ceremony that he had practiced since his youth, he opened, closed, and opened the fridge again, expecting an immaculate conception of a jar of pickles. Thomas was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven different ways to say fry bread.

Fry bread. Water, flour, salt, rolled and molded into shape, dropped into hot oil. A traditional food. A simple recipe. But Indians could spend their whole lives looking for the perfect piece of fry bread. The tribe held a fry bread cooking contest every year, and most Spokanes had their own recipe. Contestants gossiped about the latest secret ingredient. Even the little kids dropped their basketballs long enough to roll up their own bread, while Lester FallsApart mixed his flour with Thunderbird Wine. Big Mom came down from her mountain annually and won the contest for thirty-seven straight years. The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota had taken second place for the last twenty years.

“Fry bread,” Jana Wind had whispered into the ear of Bobby Running-Jones as they lay down together.

“Well, fry bread to you, too,” Bobby had said to Jana after he came home late from the bar.

“Do you want to do the fry bread?” Indian boys often asked Indian girls at their very first reservation high school dance.

“Shit,” Victor had said once. “I ain’t got much fry bread left. How long before we get to play some real music?”

As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas sat again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song, and called it “Reservation Blues.” Soon after that, the Federal Express showed up at his door with an overnight package.

“This is for Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” the FedEx guy said. He was nervous and kept scanning the tree line.

“I’m him,” Thomas said.

“Sign here,” the FedEx guy said. “Did you know I was in the war?”

“Which war?”

“All of them,” the FedEx guy said, handed the package over, and ran for his van. Thomas waved. The FedEx guy smiled, saluted, and drove away. Thomas figured that Federal Express sent its bravest and craziest couriers out to the reservation, but that made sense. Thomas opened the package. It was a letter from some Flathead Indian in Arlee, Montana. He said he was the owner of the Tipi Pole Tavern and wanted Coyote Springs to come play that weekend. He would pay.

“He’ll pay,” Thomas whispered, then chanted, then sang.

From Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s journal:

Coyote:A small canid (Canis latrans) native to western North America that is closely related to the American wolf and whose cry has often been compared to that of Sippie Wallace and Janis Joplin, among others.

Coyote:A traditional figure in Native American mythology, alternately responsible for the creation of the earth and for some of the more ignorant acts after the fact.

Coyote:A trickster whose bag of tricks contains permutations of love, hate, weather, chance, laughter, and tears, e.g., Lucille Ball.

Spring:An ultimate source of supply, especially a source of water issuing from the ground.

Spring:To issue with speed and force, as in a raging guitar solo.

Spring:To make a leap or series of leaps, e.g., from stage to waiting arms of Indian and non-Indian fans.

The blue van, tattered and bruised, cruised down an anonymous highway on the Flathead Indian Reservation and searched for the dirt road that led to the Tipi Pole Tavern. Actually, Thomas, Junior, and Victor attempted to drive and navigate. As a result of this partnership, the blue van and its three occupants, along with their musical equipment, were lost.

“Shit, Junior,” Victor said, “there ain’t but two or three roads on this whole reservation, and you’re telling me we’re lost.”

“This goddamn map is useless,” Junior said. “There are all sorts of roads ain’t even on it. This road we’re on now ain’t on the map.”

“Listen,” Thomas said, “maps just give advice anyway.”

The blue van suddenly stopped at a crossroads.

“Which way?” Thomas asked because he was driving.

“I don’t know,” Victor and Junior said because they weren’t driving.

“Let’s decide it the old Indian way,” Thomas said because he tried to be as traditional as the twentieth century allowed.

“What’s that?” Victor and Junior asked because they were as contemporary as cable television.

“We’ll drive straight,” Thomas said and pointed with his lips. “Then we find a house and ask somebody for directions.

The blue van started again, shuddered a little bit, then traveled down the highway for nearly a mile before it came upon a HUD house. Those government houses looked the same from reservation to reservation. The house on the Flathead Reservation looked like Simon’s house on the Spokane Reservation. A Flathead woman and her granddaughter stood outside in their near-yard, hands on hips, waiting.

“We heard you coming from a long ways off,” the Flathead woman said as the blue van pulled into her almost-driveway and stopped.

“Where’s the Tipi Pole Tavern?” Junior asked.

“Over there,” the woman answered and waved her arm in a random sort of way.

“Can you be more specific?” Victor asked, irritated.

The woman looked at her granddaughter, who was about five years old with her hair already gray in places. Wise old kid. The grandmother and granddaughter actually looked like sisters, except the granddaughter was forty years younger and two feet shorter.

“It’s over there, not too far,” the granddaughter answered and waved her arm in a general sort of direction.

“Jeez,” Victor said. “How do we get there?”

“Why you want to know?” the woman and granddaughter asked.

“Because we’re playing over there tonight,” Junior said.

“Playing what?” the granddaughter asked.

“Music,” Victor said. “We’re a band.”

“What’s your name?” the grandmother asked.

“Coyote Springs,” Thomas said.

The grandmother walked close to the blue van, picked up her granddaughter so she could see inside, and looked the band over closely.

“Who’s the lead singer?” the granddaughter asked.

“I am,” Thomas said.

“Well, then,” the granddaughter said directly to Thomas. “Just go back down the way you came, take a left at the first intersection after a big tree stump painted red. Drive down that road for a while and then take the first right you see. About three mailboxes down that way is the Tipi Pole Tavern.”

“Thanks, cousin,” Thomas said, and the blue van pulled back onto the highway and made its way to the tavern.