The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

by Sherman Alexie

  It took a while for our coach to show up so we spent the time looking at these first-aid manuals. These books had all kinds of horrible injuries. Hands and feet smashed flat in printing presses, torn apart by lawnmowers, burned and dismembered. Faces that had gone through windshields, dragged over gravel, split open by garden tools. The stuff was disgusting, but we kept looking, flipping through photograph after photograph, trading books, until we all wanted to throw up.

  While I looked at those close-ups of death and destruction, I lost it. I think everybody in that room, everybody on the team, lost that feeling of immortality. We went out and lost the championship game by twenty points. I missed every shot I took. I missed everything.

  “So,” I asked Adrian. “You think Julius will make it all the way?”

  “Maybe, maybe.”

  There’s a definite history of reservation heroes who never finish high school, who never finish basketball seasons. Hell, there’s been one or two guys who played just a few minutes of one game, just enough to show what they could have been. And there’s the famous case of Silas Sirius, who made one move and scored one basket in his entire basketball career. People still talk about it.

  “Hey,” I asked Adrian. “Remember Silas Sirius?”

  “Hell,” Adrian said. “Do I remember? I was there when he grabbed that defensive rebound, took a step, and flew the length of the court, did a full spin in midair, and then dunked that fucking ball. And I don’t mean it looked like he flew, or it was so beautiful it was almost like he flew. I mean, he flew, period.”

  I laughed, slapped my legs, and knew that I believed Adrian’s story more as it sounded less true.

  “Shit,” he continued. “And he didn’t grow no wings. He just kicked his legs a little. Held that ball like a baby in his hand. And he was smiling. Really. Smiling when he flew. Smiling when he dunked it, smiling when he walked off the court and never came back. Hell, he was still smiling ten years after that.”

  I laughed some more, quit for a second, then laughed a little longer because it was the right thing to do.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Silas was a ballplayer.”

  “Real ballplayer,” Adrian agreed.

  In the outside world, a person can be a hero one second and a nobody the next. Think about it. Do white people remember the names of those guys who dove into that icy river to rescue passengers from that plane wreck a few years back? Hell, white people don’t even remember the names of the dogs who save entire families from burning up in house fires by barking. And, to be honest, I don’t remember none of those names either, but a reservation hero is remembered. A reservation hero is a hero forever. In fact, their status grows over the years as the stories are told and retold.

  “Yeah,” Adrian said. “It’s too bad that damn diabetes got him. Silas was always talking about a comeback.”

  “Too bad, too bad.”

  We both leaned further back into our chairs. Silence. We watched the grass grow, the rivers flow, the winds blow.

  “Damn,” Adrian asked. “When did that fucking traffic signal quit working?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Shit, they better fix it. Might cause an accident.”

  We both looked at each other, looked at the traffic signal, knew that about only one car an hour passed by, and laughed our asses off. Laughed so hard that when we tried to rearrange ourselves, Adrian ended up with my ass and I ended up with his. That looked so funny that we laughed them off again and it took us most of an hour to get them back right again.

  Then we heard glass breaking in the distance.

  “Sounds like beer bottles,” Adrian said.

  “Yeah, Coors Light, I think.”

  “Bottled 1988.”

  We started to laugh, but a tribal cop drove by and cruised down the road where Julius and his friends had walked earlier.

  “Think they’ll catch them?” I asked Adrian.

  “Always do.”

  After a few minutes, the tribal cop drove by again, with Julius in the backseat and his friends running behind.

  “Hey,” Adrian asked. “What did he do?”

  “Threw a brick through a BIA pickup’s windshield,” one of the Indian boys yelled back.

  “Told you it sounded like a pickup window,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, a 1982 Chevy.”

  “With red paint.”

  “No, blue.”

  We laughed for just a second. Then Adrian sighed long and deep. He rubbed his head, ran his fingers through his hair, scratched his scalp hard.

  “I think Julius is going to go bad,” he said.

  “No way,” I said. “He’s just horsing around.”

  “Maybe, maybe.”

  It’s hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don’t wonder if it’s half filled or half empty. They just hope it’s good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.

  And, just like everybody else, Indians need heroes to help them learn how to survive. But what happens when our heroes don’t even know how to pay their bills?

  “Shit, Adrian,” I said. “He’s just a kid.”

  “Ain’t no children on a reservation.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before. Well,” I said. “I guess that Julius is pretty good in school, too.”

  “And?”

  “And he wants to maybe go to college.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said and laughed. And I laughed because half of me was happy and half of me wasn’t sure what else to do.

  A year later, Adrian and I sat on the same porch in the same chairs. We’d done things in between, like ate and slept and read the newspaper. It was another hot summer. Then again, summer is supposed to be hot.

  “I’m thirsty,” Adrian said. “Give me a beer.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? We don’t drink anymore.”

  “Shit,” Adrian said. “I keep forgetting. Give me a goddamn Pepsi.”

  “That’s a whole case for you today already.”

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck these substitute addictions.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, hours, and then Julius Windmaker staggered down the road.

  “Oh, look at that,” Adrian said. “Not even two in the afternoon and he’s drunk as a skunk.”

  “Don’t he have a game tonight?”

  “Yeah, he does.”

  “Well, I hope he sobers up in time.”

  “Me, too.”

  I’d only played one game drunk and it was in an all-Indian basketball tournament after I got out of high school. I’d been drinking the night before and woke up feeling kind of sick, so I got drunk again. Then I went out and played a game. I felt disconnected the whole time. Nothing seemed to fit right. Even my shoes, which had fit perfectly before, felt too big for my feet. I couldn’t even see the basketball or basket clearly. They were more like ideas. I mean, I knew where they were generally supposed to be, so I guessed at where I should be. Somehow or another, I scored ten points.

  “He’s been drinking quite a bit, enit?” Adrian asked.

  “Yeah, I hear he’s even been drinking Sterno.”

  “Shit, that’ll kill his brain quicker than shit.”

  Adrian and I left the porch that night and went to the tribal school to watch Julius play. He still looked good in his uniform, although he was a little puffy around the edges. But he just wasn’t the ballplayer we all remembered or expected. He missed shots, traveled, threw dumb passes that we all knew were dumb passes. By the fourth quarter, Julius sat at the end of the bench, hanging his head, and the crowd filed out, all talking about which of the younger players looked good. We talked about some kid named Lucy in the third grade who already had a nice move or two.

  Everyb
ody told their favorite Julius Windmaker stories, too. Times like that, on a reservation, a basketball game felt like a funeral and wake all rolled up together.

  Back at home, on the porch, Adrian and I sat wrapped in shawls because the evening was kind of cold.

  “It’s too bad, too bad,” I said. “I thought Julius might be the one to make it all the way.”

  “I told you he wouldn’t. I told you so.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t rub it in.”

  We sat there in silence and remembered all of our heroes, ballplayers from seven generations, all the way back. It hurts to lose any of them because Indians kind of see ballplayers as saviors. I mean, if basketball would have been around, I’m sure Jesus Christ would’ve been the best point guard in Nazareth. Probably the best player in the entire world. And in the beyond. I just can’t explain how much losing Julius Windmaker hurt us all.

  “Well,” Adrian asked. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Shit, that damn traffic signal is still broken. Look.”

  Adrian pointed down the road and he was right. But what’s the point of fixing it in a place where the STOP signs are just suggestions?

  “What time is it?” Adrian asked.

  “I don’t know. Ten, I think.”

  “Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, Spokane, anywhere. Let’s just go.”

  “Okay,” I said, and we both walked inside the house, shut the door, and locked it tight. No. We left it open just a little bit in case some crazy Indian needed a place to sleep. And in the morning we found crazy Julius passed out on the living room carpet.

  “Hey, you bum,” Adrian yelled. “Get off my floor.”

  “This is my house, Adrian,” I said.

  “That’s right. I forgot. Hey, you bum, get your ass off Victor’s floor.”

  Julius groaned and farted but he didn’t wake up. It really didn’t bother Adrian that Julius was on the floor, so he threw an old blanket on top of him. Adrian and I grabbed our morning coffee and went back out to sit on the porch. We had both just about finished our cups when a group of Indian kids walked by, all holding basketballs of various shapes and conditions.

  “Hey, look,” Adrian said. “Ain’t that the Lucy girl?”

  I saw that it was, a little brown girl with scarred knees, wearing her daddy’s shirt.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” I said.

  “I heard she’s so good that she plays for the sixth grade boys team.”

  “Really? She’s only in third grade herself, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, yeah, she’s a little warrior.”

  Adrian and I watched those Indian children walk down the road, walking toward another basketball game.

  “God, I hope she makes it all the way,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Adrian said, stared into the bottom of his cup, and then threw it across the yard. And we both watched it with all of our eyes, while the sun rose straight up above us and settled down behind the house, watched that cup revolve, revolve, until it came down whole to the ground.

  AMUSEMENTS

  I lower a frayed rope into the depths and hoist

  the same old Indian tears to my eyes. The liquid is pure and

  irresistible.

  —Adrian C. Louis

  AFTER SUMMER HEAT and too much coat-pocket whiskey, Dirty Joe passed out on the worn grass of the carnival midway and Sadie and I stood over him, looked down at his flat face, a map for all the wars he fought in the Indian bars. Dirty Joe was no warrior in the old sense. He got his name because he cruised the taverns at closing time, drank all the half-empties and never cared who might have left them there.

  “What the hell do we do with him?” I asked Sadie.

  “Ah, Victor, let’s leave the old bastard here,” Sadie said, but we both knew we couldn’t leave another Indian passed out in the middle of a white carnival. Then again, we didn’t want to carry his temporarily dead body to wherever it was we were headed next.

  “We leave him here and he’s going to jail for sure,” I said.

  “Maybe the drunk tank will do him some good,” she said, sat down hard on the grass, her hair falling out of the braid. A century ago she might have been beautiful, her face reflected in the river instead of a mirror. But all the years have changed more than the shape of our blood and eyes. We wear fear now like a turquoise choker, like a familiar shawl.

  We sat there beside Dirty Joe and watched all the white tourists watch us, laugh, point a finger, their faces twisted with hate and disgust. I was afraid of all of them, wanted to hide behind my Indian teeth, the quick joke.

  “Shit,” I said. “We should be charging admission for this show.”

  “Yeah, a quarter a head and we’d be drinking Coors Light for a week.”

  “For the rest of our lives, enit?”

  After a while I started to agree with Sadie about leaving Dirty Joe to the broom and dustpan. I was just about to stand up when I heard a scream behind me, turned quick to find out what the hell was going on, and saw the reason: a miniature roller coaster called the Stallion.

  “Sadie,” I said. “Let’s put him on the roller coaster.”

  She smiled for the first time in four or five hundred years and got to her feet.

  “That’s a real shitty thing to do,” she said, laughed, grabbed his arms while I got his legs, and we carried him over to the Stallion.

  “Hey,” I asked the carny. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you let my cousin here ride this thing all day.”

  The carny looked at me, at Dirty Joe, back at me and smiled.

  “He’s drunk as a skunk. He might get hurt.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Indians ain’t afraid of a little gravity.”

  “Oh, hell,” the carny said. “Why not?”

  We loaded Dirty Joe into the last car and checked his pockets for anything potentially lethal. Nothing. Sadie and I stood there and watched Dirty Joe ride a few times around the circle, his head rolling from side to side, back and forth. He looked like an old blanket we gave away.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus,” Sadie screamed, laughed. She leaned on my shoulder and laughed until tears fell. I looked around and saw a crowd had gathered and joined in on the laughter. Twenty or thirty white faces, open mouths grown large and deafening, wide eyes turned toward Sadie and me. They were jury and judge for the twentieth-century fancydance of these court jesters who would pour Thunderbird wine into the Holy Grail.

  “Sadie, I think we better get out of here.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said, realizing what we had done. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait, we have to get Dirty Joe.”

  “We ain’t got time,” she said and pulled me away from the crowd. We walked fast and did our best to be anything but Indian. Two little redheaded boys ran by, made Indian noises with their mouths, and as I turned to watch them, one pointed his finger at me and shot.

  “Bang,” he yelled. “You’re dead, Indian.”

  I looked back over to the Stallion, watched Dirty Joe regain consciousness and lift his head and search for something familiar.

  “Sadie, he’s awake. We got to go get him.”

  “Go get him yourself,” she said and walked away from me. I watched her move against the crowd, the only person not running to see the drunk Indian riding the Stallion. I turned back in time to watch Dirty Joe stumble from the roller coaster and empty his stomach on the platform. The carny yelled something I couldn’t hear, pushed Dirty Joe from behind, and sent him tumbling down the stairs face-first into the grass.

  The crowd formed a circle around Dirty Joe; some thin man in a big hat counted like Dirty Joe was a fighter on the canvas. Two security guards pushed through the people, using their billy clubs for leverage. One knelt down beside Dirty Joe while the other spoke to the carny. The carny waved his arms wildly, explained his position, and they both turned toward me. The carny pointed, although he didn’t h
ave to, and the guard jumped off the platform.

  “Okay, chief,” he yelled. “Get your ass over here.” I backpedaled, turned and ran, and could hear the guard behind me as I ran down the midway, past a surprised carny into the fun house where I stumbled through a revolving tunnel, jumped a railing, ran through a curtain, and found myself staring at a three-foot-tall reflection.

  Crazy mirrors, I thought as the security guard fell from the tunnel, climbed to his feet, and pulled his billy club from his belt.

  Crazy mirrors, I thought, the kind that distort your features, make you fatter, thinner, taller, shorter. The kind that make a white man remember he’s the master of ceremonies, barking about the Fat Lady, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Indian who offered up another Indian like some treaty.

  Crazy mirrors, I thought, the kind that can never change the dark of your eyes and the folding shut of the good part of your past.

  THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO SAY PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  JUST AFTER VICTOR LOST his job at the BIA, he also found out that his father had died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona. Victor hadn’t seen his father in a few years, only talked to him on the telephone once or twice, but there still was a genetic pain, which was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken bone.

  Victor didn’t have any money. Who does have money on a reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks salespeople? His father had a savings account waiting to be claimed, but Victor needed to find a way to get to Phoenix. Victor’s mother was just as poor as he was, and the rest of his family didn’t have any use at all for him. So Victor called the Tribal Council.

  “Listen,” Victor said. “My father just died. I need some money to get to Phoenix to make arrangements.”

  “Now, Victor,” the council said. “You know we’re having a difficult time financially.”

  “But I thought the council had special funds set aside for stuff like this.”

  “Now, Victor, we do have some money available for the proper return of tribal members’ bodies. But I don’t think we have enough to bring your father all the way back from Phoenix.”

  “Well,” Victor said. “It ain’t going to cost all that much. He had to be cremated. Things were kind of ugly. He died of a heart attack in his trailer and nobody found him for a week. It was really hot, too. You get the picture.”