Sherman Alexie - Reservation Blues

“Jeez,” said one Spokane woman to another, “those New Age princesses like Indian men, enit?”

“Enit, but they don’t know what they’re getting into, do they?”

Betty and Veronica always stood in the front row and sang along with the band. They had great voices, which could be heard even through the noise that the band created. After the band had quit for the night, Betty and Veronica often entertained the stragglers by playing a few songs themselves. Both played guitar, and they sang duet on their own songs:

Indian boy, don’t go away

Indian boy, what did you say?

Indian boy, I’ll turn on the light

Indian boy, come home tonight

Most of the Spokane Indian women wanted to kick Betty and Veronica off the reservation, but the Indian men lined up every night to listen to the white women’s songs. David WalksAlong had even invited them to his home for dinner. WalksAlong was nearly a gourmet cook and could do wondrous things with commodity food. But Betty and Veronica were scared of Michael White Hawk.

They did go home with Junior and Victor one night, and everybody on the reservation knew about it. Little Indian boys crept around the house and tried to peek in the windows. All of them swore they saw the white women naked, then bragged it wasn’t the first time they’d seen a naked white woman. None of them had seen a naked Indian woman, let alone a white woman. But the numbers of naked white women who had visited the Spokane Indian Reservation rapidly grew in the boys’ imaginations, as if the size of their lies proved they were warriors.

Betty and Veronica did not take off their clothes that night, although Betty shared a bed with Junior and Veronica with Victor.

“Am I your first Indian man?” Junior asked Betty.

“No.”

“How many?”

“A few.”

“How many is a few?”

“About five or six, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well, some were only part Indian,” Betty said.

“Jeez, which part?” asked Junior. Betty kissed him then to shut him up. Both fell asleep with their shoes on.

In the other bedroom, Victor had his hand down Veronica’s pants within a few seconds. She kept pushing it away, but Victor was persistent.

“Stop,” Veronica said. “I don’t want you to do that.”

“Why you come in here, then?” Victor asked.

“Because I like you.”

“How much do you like me?”

“You’re the best. I mean, you’re an Indian and a guitar player. How much better could you be?”

Victor pushed his hand down her pants again.

“Please stop,” she said. “I just want to kiss. I’m not ready to do that.”

Victor removed his hand but pushed Veronica’s head down near his crotch.

“Do that,” he said.

“No, I don’t do that. I don’t like it.”

“Come on.”

“No. But I’ll do it with my hand.”

Victor unbuttoned his pants and closed his eyes. Afterwards, Veronica curled up next to him as he snored. She was cold and wanted to get under the blankets but didn’t want to wake him up.

Betty and Veronica left the next morning, before Junior and Victor even woke, but they left a note. Junior read it to Victor.

“Shit,” Victor said. “They live where?”

“Seattle,” Junior said. “They have to go back to work.”

“Work? Where do they work?”

“At some bookstore, I guess. But it says here they own the bookstore.”

“Own the bookstore? Man, they must be rich, enit?” I guess.

Betty and Veronica were co-owners of a New Age bookstore in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle. They had temporarily closed it down when rumors of the all-Indian rock band hit the store. They had driven to Wellpinit, three hundred and six miles away, in six hours.

“What’s the name of the bookstore?” Victor asked.

“I don’t know. They left a bookmark though. It says ‘Doppelgangers.’”

“What the hell is a doppelganger?”

“I think it means twins or something. Like a shadow of you.

“White shadows, enit?” Victor asked.

“I guess,” Junior said.

“Do you think they’ll be back?”

“I hope so.”

The gossip about the band spread from reservation to reservation. All kinds of Indians showed up: Yakama, Lummi, Makah, Snohomish, Coeur d’Alene. Thomas and his band had developed a small following before they ever played a gig. If they’d had a phone, it would have been ringing. If they’d had a post office box, it would have been stuffed. Indians talked about the band at powwows and feasts, at softball tournaments and education conferences. But the band still didn’t have a name.

“We need a name for this band,” Thomas said after another well-attended rehearsal.

“How about Bloodthirsty Savages?” Victor asked.

“That’s a cool name, enit?” Junior asked.

“I was thinking about Coyote Springs,” Thomas said.

“That’s too damn Indian,” Junior said. “It’s always Coyote this, Coyote that. I’m sick of Coyote.”

“Fuck Coyote,” Victor said.

Lightning fell on the reservation right then, and a small fire started down near the Midnight Uranium Mine. Coyote stole Junior’s water truck and hid it in the abandoned dance hall at the powwow grounds. The truck was too big for the doors, so nobody was sure how that truck fit in there. Junior lost his job, but he had to take that truck apart piece by piece and reassemble it outside first.

The entire band was unemployed now, and Coyote had proven his strength, so the band accepted the name and became Coyote Springs. But it wasn’t a happy marriage. Coyote Springs argued back and forth all the time. Victor and Junior threatened to quit the band every day, and Thomas brought them back with promises of money and magazine covers. Victor and Junior liked to sit outside the Trading Post in Thomas’s blue van and pose for all the women who happened to walk by.

“Ya-hey,” Victor called out to the full-blood Indian women. He also called out to the white women who worked for the Tribe, especially those nurses from the IHS Clinic. Victor had a thing for white nylons, but the nurses ignored him.

“Ya-hey,” the Indian women shouted back, which was the extent of conversation. Most Indians never needed to say much to each other. Entire reservation romances began, flourished, and died during the hour-long wait to receive commodity food on the first of each month.

At first, Coyote Springs just played covers of other people’s songs. They already knew every Hank Williams song intimately because that’s all their fathers sang when drunk. They learned the entire Buddy Holly catalogue, picked up a few Aerosmith songs, and sang Spokane Indian words in place of the Spanish in Ritchie Valens’s version of “La Bamba.”

“You know,” Thomas said, “I’m going to start writing our own songs.”

“Why?” Junior asked.

“Well,” Thomas said, “because Buddy Holly wasn’t a Spokane Indian.”

“Wait,” Junior said. “Buddy was my cousin.”

“That’s true,” Victor said. “He was quarter-blood, enit?”

“Besides,” Victor said, “how come you get to write the songs?”

“Yeah,” Junior said.

“Because I have the money,” Thomas said. He had forty-two dollars in his pocket and another fifty hidden at home, much more than Junior and Victor had together. Victor understood the economics of the deal, how money equals power, especially on a reservation so poor that a dollar bill once changed the outcome of tribal elections. David WalksAlong was elected Councilman by a single vote because he’d paid Lester FallsApart a dollar to punch the ballot for him.

“Okay, then, asshole,” Victor said, “write the songs. But I’m still the Guitar God.”