Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues

“Don’t you have a hangover?” Chess asked.

“Nope,” Junior said. “I didn’t drink none. Just orange juice.”

“How come?”

“Somebody needed to stay sober,” Junior said. “This is New York City, enit?”

Chess was surprised at Junior’s logic.

“You know, Junior,” Chess said, “you’re always saving Victor from something.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They dragged Victor to their hotel room and knocked on the door. They were shocked all to hell when George Wright answered.

“What’s going on?” Thomas and Junior asked, ready to fight.

“Listen,” Wright said, “it’s all right. I was just waiting for you to get back. Checkers asked me to wait. She’s sleeping now.”

“What happened?” asked Chess as they dragged Victor into the room. “Where’s Checkers? What did you do to her?”

“She’s okay, she’s okay,” Wright said. “I didn’t do anything. It was just a nightmare. She just had a nightmare.

“A nightmare?” Chess asked.

“Yes,” Wright said, “a nightmare.”

Chess went to look in on Checkers. Thomas and Junior surrounded Wright as best as they could. Victor snored on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” Junior asked. “And where’s that asshole Sheridan?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Wright said. “I just came here to apologize.”

“Apologize for what?” Junior asked.

Chess walked out of the bedroom.

“How is she?” Thomas asked.

“She’s sore, but okay, I guess,” Chess said. “She said it was the worst nightmare she ever had.”

Junior shivered.

“Checkers said you saved her life,” Chess said to Wright.

“I just woke her up,” Wright said.

“Why you helping us?”

“Because I owe you.

“Owe us for what?”

Wright looked at Coyote Springs. He saw their Indian faces. He saw the faces of millions of Indians, beaten, scarred by smallpox and frostbite, split open by bayonets and bullets. He looked at his own white hands and saw the blood stains there.

INDIAN BOY TAKES A drink of everything that killed his brother

Indian boy drives his car through the rail, over the shoulder

Off the road, on the rez, where survivors are forced to gather

All his bones, all his blood, while the dead watch the world shatter

chorus:

But it’s a small world

You don’t have to pay attention

It’s the reservation

The news don’t give it a mention

Yeah, it’s a small world

Getting smaller and smaller and smaller

Indian girl disappeared while hitchhiking on the old highway

Indian girl left the road and some white wolf ate her heart away

Indian girl found naked by the river, shot twice in the head

One more gone, one more gone, and our world fills with all of our dead

(repeat chorus)

A week after Coyote Springs staggered from Manhattan back onto the Spokane Indian Reservation, Junior Polatkin stole a rifle from the gun rack in Simon’s pickup. Junior didn’t know anything about caliber, but he knew the rifle was loaded. He knew the rifle was loaded because Simon had told him so. Junior strapped that rifle over his shoulder and climbed up the water tower that had been empty for most of his life. He looked down at his reservation, at the tops of HUD houses and the Trading Post. A crowd gathered below him and circled the base of the tower. He could hear the distant sirens of Tribal Police cars and was amazed the cops were already on their way.

Junior unshouldered the rifle. He felt the smooth, cool wood of the stock, set the butt of the rifle against the metal grating of the floor, and placed his forehead against the mouth of the barrel. There was a childhood game like that, Junior remembered, with a baseball bat. Standing at home plate, you placed one end of the bat on the ground and held your forehead against the other. You were supposed to spin round and round the bat, once, twice, ten times. Then you had to run from home plate to first base, weaving and falling like a drunk. Junior remembered. He flipped the safety off, held his thumb against the trigger, and felt the slight tension. Junior squeezed the trigger.

The night before Junior Polatkin climbed the water tower, Checkers Warm Water crawled out of a bedroom window in Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s house. She had to climb out of the window because the Tribal Police had ordered the band to stay inside the house. The death threats had started soon after Coyote Springs returned to the reservation, and the Tribal Police weren’t taking any chances. Michael White Hawk had been released from Tribal Jail but didn’t have much to say about the band. He just walked blankly around the softball field with his huge head still wrapped in bandages, like some carnival psychic. The Tribal Cops kept suggesting that he should go to Indian Health Service, but White Hawk refused to go and just stood for hours at the softball field. He wouldn’t say anything at all, but then he would burst into sudden frenetic conversations with himself. He swung his fists at the air and tried to dig up that grave in center field before the Tribal Police calmed him down. White Hawk had been crazy and dangerous before he was knocked twice on the head. Now he had become crazy, dangerous, and unpredictable. Even White Hawk’s buddies were afraid.

“He’s just acting,” White Hawk’s friends reassured each other. “He’s just trying to fool everybody into thinking he’s goofy.”

White Hawk was asleep on third base when Checkers slipped out of the window in Thomas’s house. Thomas didn’t even move, but Chess stirred in bed as Checkers slipped away. Even sound asleep, Chess reached out for her sister. Checkers had not slept well since her return from New York. Phil Sheridan had come back again and again. Sometimes he threatened her. Other times he remained on the edge of her dreams. No matter what she dreamed about, Sheridan sat in a corner with a cup of coffee in his hands. He wore a wool suit or his cavalry dress blues. Sheridan had eventually forced Checkers to abandon her own room and sleep on the floor beside the bed that Thomas and Chess shared.

Wide awake, Checkers climbed out the window and snuck past the Tribal Cops asleep in their cruisers. She avoided the roads and cut across fields. There was no moon on that night, and the walk was treacherous. She stepped in gopher holes, tripped over abandoned barbed wire, heard the laughter of animals. Checkers wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was afraid of what waited in the dark. She heard rustling in the brush, the scratch-scratch of unseen animals as they climbed pine trees.

But she made her way through to the Catholic Church. She saw its lights in the distance, and it grew larger and brighter as she approached. Checkers wasn’t sure how long the walk had taken. But the church was still lit up, bright as God. She walked boldly through the front door and stepped inside.

Father Arnold kneeled at the front of the church. His whole body rocked and shook. From Checkers’s viewpoint, she couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying.

“Father?” Checkers whispered, but he didn’t respond.

“Father?” Checkers said louder, and Arnold turned around. He had been crying, was still crying. He wiped his face with a sleeve of his cassock. He stood.

“Father?” Checkers asked. “Are you okay?”

She slowly walked toward him. She had dreamed of this moment. Even as Phil Sheridan floated on the periphery, Checkers had dreamed of taking Father Arnold in her arms. She dreamed of the smell of his hair, washed with cheap shampoo, all that a priest could afford. She dreamed of the kiss they shared just before Coyote Springs left for Big Mom’s house, for Manhattan.