Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues

Thomas was the only Spokane who talked much to the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota. But then, most of the Spokanes thought Thomas was pretty goofy, especially after he gave Robert Johnson that ride up to Big Mom’s place. Thomas had carried Johnson’s guitar around with him ever since then. He so strongly identified with that guitar that he wrapped it in a beautiful quilt and gave it a place of honor in his living room. When he went out for his daily walks, Thomas cradled the guitar like a baby, oblivious to the laughter all around him. But the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota didn’t laugh at Thomas.

“Ya-hey,” Thomas called out.

“Ya-hey, Thomas,” the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. “The end of the world is near.”

“I know it is,” Thomas said and dropped a few coins into the old man’s hat, which already contained some change and a check from Father Arnold, priest of the Catholic Church. Although the Spokanes ignored the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota, they weren’t going to let him starve, and Father Arnold constantly recruited lost souls.

“That’s a good-looking guitar,” the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. “I hear you got it from the black man.”

“That I did,” Thomas said.

“You be careful with that music, enit? Music is a dangerous thing.”

Thomas smiled and walked into the Trading Post, one of the few lucrative businesses on the reservation. Its shelves were stocked with reservation staples: Diet Pepsi, Spam, Wonder bread, and a cornucopia of various carbohydrates, none of them complex. One corner of the Trading Post was devoted to the gambling machines that had become mandatory on every reservation. The Tribe had installed a few new slot machines earlier that day, and the Spokanes lined up to play. Dreams of the jackpot. Some Indian won a few hundred dollars every afternoon and fell down broke by the next morning. Thomas didn’t gamble with his money, but he did gamble with his stomach when he heated up a microwave burrito. He paid for the burrito and a Pepsi and, carrying his food and guitar, walked back outside to eat.

He sat on a curb outside the Trading Post, hungry and ready to eat, just as Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin walked up. Victor was the reservation John Travolta because he still wore clothes from the disco era. He had won a few thousand dollars in Reno way back in 1979, just after he graduated from high school. He bought a closet full of silk shirts and polyester pants and had never had any money since then to buy anything new. He hadn’t gained any weight in thirteen years, but the clothes were tattered and barely held to his body. His wardrobe made him an angry man.

“Ya-hey, Builds-the-Shithouse,” Victor said.

“Ya-hey,” Thomas said.

“Is that your guitar?” Junior Polatkin asked.

“That’s his woman,” Victor said.

Junior Polatkin was Victor’s sidekick, but nobody could figure out why, since Junior was supposed to be smart. A tall, good-looking buck with hair like Indians in the movies, long, purple-black, and straight, Junior was president of the Native American Hair Club. If there had been a hair bank, like a blood bank or sperm bank, Junior could have donated yards of the stuff and made a fortune. He drove a water truck for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and had even attended college for a semester or two. There were rumors he had fathered a white baby or two at school.

A job was hard to come by on the reservation, even harder to keep, and most figured that Victor used Junior for his regular income, but nobody ever knew what Junior saw in Victor. Still, Junior could be an asshole, too, because Victor was extremely contagious.

“This isn’t my guitar,” Thomas said. “But I’m going to change the world with it.”

Victor and Junior sat beside Thomas, one on either side. The three Spokane Indians sat together on the sidewalk in front of the Trading Post. Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito, and that particular piece of accidental sidewalk mostly belonged to Thomas. He usually sat there alone but now shared it with Victor and Junior, two of the most accomplished bullies of recent Native American history.

A few years earlier, after the parking lot for the Trading Post was built, the BIA contractor had a little bit of cement left over. So he decided to build a sidewalk rather than lug the cement all the way back to the warehouse and fill out complicated, unnecessary, and official government papers. Thomas was watching the BIA workers pour the cement and never saw Victor and Junior sneak up on him. Victor and Junior knocked Thomas over, pressed his face into the wet cement, and left a permanent impression in the sidewalk. The doctors at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane removed the cement from his skin, but the scars remained on his face. The sidewalk belonged to Thomas because of that pain.

“You named that guitar?” Junior asked.

“It’s a secret name,” Thomas said. “I ain’t ever going to tell anybody.”

Victor pulled Thomas into a quick headlock.

“Tell me,” Victor said and cut off Thomas’s air for a second.

“Come on,” Junior said. “Take it easy.”

“I ain’t letting you go until you tell me,” Victor said.

Thomas was not surprised by Victor’s sudden violence. These little wars were intimate affairs for those who dreamed in childhood of fishing for salmon but woke up as adults to shop at the Trading Post and stand in line for U.S.D.A. commodity food instead. They savagely, repeatedly, opened up cans of commodities and wept over the rancid meat, forced to eat what stray dogs ignored. Indian men like Victor roared from place to place, set fires, broke windows, and picked on the weaker members of the Tribe. Thomas had been the weakest Indian boy on the whole reservation, so small and skinny, with bigger wrists than arms, a head too large for its body, and ugly government glasses. When he grew older and stronger, grew into an Indian man, he was the smallest Indian man on the reservation.

“Tell me the name of your goddamned guitar,” Victor said and squeezed Thomas a little harder.

Thomas didn’t say a word, didn’t struggle, but thought It’s a good day to die. It’s a good day to get my ass kicked.

“Come on, Victor,” Junior said. “Let him go. He ain’t going to tell us nothing.”

“I ain’t leaving until he tells us,” Victor said, but then had a brainstorm. “Or until he plays us a song.”

“No way,” Junior said. “I don’t want to hear that.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” Thomas said. “If I can play your favorite Patsy Cline song, will you leave me alone?”

“What happens if you can’t play the song?” Victor asked.

“Then you can kick my ass some more.”

“We’ll kick your ass anyway,” Victor said. “If you can’t play the song, we get the guitar.”

“That’s a pretty good deal, enit?” Junior asked.

“Enit,” Victor said. “It’s better than hearing another one of his goddamn stories.”

Thomas repeated stories constantly. All the other Indians on the reservation heard those stories so often that the words crept into dreams. An Indian telling his friends about a dream he had was halfway through the telling before everyone realized it was actually one of Thomas’s stealth stories. Even the white people on the reservation grew tired of Thomas’s stories, but they were more polite when they ran away.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s stories climbed into your clothes like sand, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated even a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet-talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.