Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues

“Where’s he gone to?” Thomas asked.

“He’s just gone,” Checkers said. “He’s AWOL. He’s MIA.”

The secondhand furniture in Thomas’s house moved an inch to the west.

“It wasn’t always this way,” Thomas said and touched his father’s hand. “It wasn’t always this way.

Samuel slept on the table while Thomas closed his eyes and told the story:

“Way back when, my father was an active alcoholic only about three months of every year. He was a binge drinker, you know? Completely drunk for three days straight, a week, a month, then he jumped back on the wagon again. Sober, he was a good man, a good father, so all the drinking had to be forgiven, enit?

“My father was Washington State High School Basketball Player of the Year in 1956. Even the white people knew how good that Indian boy played. He was just a little guy too, about five-foot-six and a hundred and fifty pounds, hair in a crewcut, and big old Indian ears sticking out. Walter Cronkite came out to the reservation and interviewed him. Cronkite stood on the free-throw line and shouted questions at my father, who dribbled from corner to corner and hit jumpshots.

“He was such a good basketball player that all the Spokanes wanted him to be more. When any Indian shows the slightest hint of talent in any direction, the rest of the tribe starts expecting Jesus. Sometimes they’ll stop a reservation hero in the middle of the street, look into his eyes, and ask him to change a can of sardines into a river of salmon.

“But my father lived up to those expectations, you know? Game after game, he defined himself. He wasn’t like some tired old sports hero, some little white kid, some Wonder-bread boy. Think about it. Take the basketball in your hands, fake left, fake right, look your defender in the eyes to let him know he won’t be stopping you. Take the ball to the rim, the hoop, the goal, the basket, that circle that meant everything in an Indian boy’s life.

“My father wasn’t any different. After his basketball days were over, he didn’t have much else. If he could’ve held a basketball in his arms when he cut down trees for the BIA, maybe my father would’ve kept that job. If he could have drank his own sweat after a basketball game and got drunk off the effort, maybe he would’ve stayed away from the real booze.”

Thomas opened his eyes and looked at his father, lying still on the kitchen table. A wake for a live man. Thomas tried to smile for the sisters. Checkers looked at the overweight Indian man on the table, saw the dirt under his fingernails, the clogged pores, the darkness around his eyes and at the elbows and knees.

“I would’ve never thought he played basketball,” Chess said.

“Me, neither,” Checkers said.

Thomas looked at his father again, studied him, and touched Samuel’s big belly.

“Did you ever play?” Chess asked.

“No,” Thomas said.

“Why not?”

“Well, even Moses only parted the Red Sea once. There are things you just can’t do twice.”

“Sometimes,” Checkers said, “I hate being Indian.”

“Ain’t that the true test?” Chess asked. “You ain’t really Indian unless there was some point in your life that you didn’t want to be.”

“Enit,” Thomas said.

“You know,” Chess said, “like when you’re walking downtown or something, and you see some drunk Indian passed out on the sidewalk.”

Thomas looked at his father.

“Oh,” Chess said. “I didn’t mean your father.”

“That’s okay,” Thomas said. “I have been walking in downtown Spokane and stumbled over my father passed out on the sidewalk.”

“Yeah,” Checkers said. “And I hate it when some Indian comes begging for money. Calling me sister or cousin. What am I supposed to do? I ain’t got much money myself. So I give it to them anyway. Then I feel bad for doing it, because I know they’re going to drink it all up.”

Checkers was always afraid of those Indian men who wandered the streets. She always thought they looked like brown-skinned zombies. Samuel Builds-the-Fire looked like a zombie on the kitchen table. Those Indian zombies lived in Missoula when she was little. Once a month, the whole Warm Water family traveled from their little shack on the reservation to pick up supplies in Missoula. Those drunk zombies always followed the family from store to store.

Still, Checkers remembered how quiet and polite some of those zombies were, just as quiet as Samuel passed out on the table. In Missoula they stood on street corners, wrapped in old quilts, and held their hands out without saying a word. Just stood there and waited.

Once, Checkers watched a white man spit into a zombie’s open hand. Just spit in his palm. The zombie wiped his hand clean on his pants and offered it again. Then the white man spit again. Checkers saw all that happen. After the white man walked away, she ran up to the zombie and gave him a piece of candy, her last piece of candy.

Thank you, the zombie said. He unwrapped the candy, popped it in his mouth, and smiled.

“What are we supposed to do?” Chess asked Thomas, as Checkers remembered her zombies. “What should we do for your father?”

“I don’t know.”

Samuel groaned in his sleep, raised his hands in a defensive position.

“Listen,” Thomas said, “do you want something to drink?”

Thomas gave them all a glass of commodity grape juice. It was very sweet, almost too sweet. Thomas loved sugar.

“Our cousins are drinking this stuff mixed with rubbing alcohol at home,” Chess said.

“Really?” Thomas said. The creativity of alcoholics constantly surprised him.

“Yeah, they call it a Rubbie Dubbie.”

“Drinking that will kill them.”

“I think that’s the idea.”

Thomas, Chess, and Checkers stayed quiet for a long time. After a while, Chess and Checkers started to sing a Flathead song of mourning. For a wake, for a wake. Samuel was still alive, but Thomas sang along without hesitation. That mourning song was B-7 on every reservation jukebox.

After the song, Thomas stood and walked away from the table where his father lay flat as a paper plate. He walked outside while the women stayed inside. They understood. Once outside, Thomas cried. Not because he needed to be alone; not because he was afraid to cry in front of women. He just wanted his tears to be individual, not tribal. Those tribal tears collected and fermented in huge BIA barrels. Then the BIA poured those tears into beer and Pepsi cans and distributed them back onto the reservation. Thomas wanted his tears to be selfish and fresh.

“Hello,” he said to the night sky. He wanted to say the first word of a prayer or a joke. A prayer and a joke often sound alike on the reservation.

“Help,” he said to the ground. He knew the words to a million songs: Indian, European, African, Mexican, Asian. He sang “Stairway to Heaven” in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood. He sang the same Indian songs continually but never sang them correctly. He wanted to make his guitar sound like a waterfall, like a spear striking salmon, but his guitar only sounded like a guitar. He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.

“Father,” he said to the crickets, who carried their own songs to worry about.

Just minutes, days, years, maybe a generation out of high school, Samuel Builds-the-Fire, Jr., raced down the reservation road in his Chevy. He stopped to pick up Lester FallsApart, who hitchhiked with no particular destination in mind.

“Ya-hey,” Samuel said. “Where you going, Lester?”

“Same place you are. Now.”

“Good enough.”

Samuel dropped the car into gear and roared down the highway.