The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

by Sherman Alexie

  “Norma,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I have cancer and I’m sorry I’m dying.”

  She took a long drink of her Diet Pepsi, stared at me for a long time. Stared hard.

  “Are you going to make any more jokes about it?” she asked.

  “Just one or two more, maybe,” I said and smiled. It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Norma slapped me in anger, had a look of concern for a moment as she wondered what a slap could do to a person with terminal cancer, and then looked angry again.

  “If you say anything funny ever again, I’m going to leave you,” Norma said. “And I’m fucking serious about that.”

  I lost my smile briefly, reached across the table to hold her hand, and said something incredibly funny. It was maybe the best one-liner I had ever uttered. Maybe the moment that would have made me a star anywhere else. But in the Powwow Tavern, which was just a front for reality, Norma heard what I had to say, stood up, and left me.

  Because Norma left me, it’s even more important to know how she arrived in my life.

  I was sitting in the Powwow Tavern on a Saturday night with my Diet Pepsi and my second-favorite cousin, Raymond.

  “Look it, look it,” he said as Norma walked into the tavern. Norma was over six feet tall. Well, maybe not six feet tall but she was taller than me, taller than everyone in the bar except the basketball players.

  “What tribe you think she is?” Raymond asked me.

  “Amazon,” I said.

  “Their reservation down by Santa Fe, enit?” Raymond asked, and I laughed so hard that Norma came over to find out about the commotion.

  “Hello, little brothers,” she said. “Somebody want to buy me a drink?”

  “What you having?” I asked.

  “Diet Pepsi,” she said and I knew we would fall in love. “Listen,” I told her. “If I stole 1,000 horses, I’d give you 501 of them.”

  “And what other women would get the other 499?” she asked.

  And we laughed. Then we laughed harder when Raymond leaned in closer to the table and said, “I don’t get it.”

  Later, after the tavern closed, Norma and I sat outside on my car and shared a cigarette. I should say that we pretended to share a cigarette since neither of us smoked. But we both thought the other did and wanted to have all that much more in common.

  After an hour or two of coughing, talking stories, and laughter, we ended up at my HUD house, watching late-night television. Raymond was passed out in the backseat of my car.

  “Hey,” she said. “That cousin of yours ain’t too smart.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But he’s cool, you know?”

  “Must be. Because you’re so good to him.”

  “He’s my cousin, you know? That’s how it is.”

  She kissed me then. Soft at first. Then harder. Our teeth clicked together like it was a junior high kiss. Still, we sat on the couch and kissed until the television signed off and broke into white noise. It was the end of another broadcast day.

  “Listen,” I said then. “I should take you home.”

  “Home?” she asked. “I thought I was at home.”

  “Well, my tipi is your tipi,” I said, and she lived there until the day I told her that I had terminal cancer.

  I have to mention the wedding, though. It was at the Spokane Tribal Longhouse and all my cousins and her cousins were there. Nearly two hundred people. Everything went smoothly until my second-favorite cousin, Raymond, drunk as a skunk, stood up in the middle of the ceremony, obviously confused.

  “I remember Jimmy real good,” Raymond said and started into his eulogy for me as I stood not two feet from him. “Jimmy was always quick with a joke. Make you laugh all the damn time. I remember once at my grandmother’s wake, he was standing by the coffin. Now, you got to remember he was only seven or eight years old. Anyway, he starts jumping up and down, yelling, She moved, she moved.”

  Everyone at the wedding laughed because it was pretty much the same crowd that was at the funeral. Raymond smiled at his newly discovered public speaking ability and continued.

  “Jimmy was always the one to make people feel better, too,” he said. “I remember once when he and I were drinking at the Powwow Tavern when all of a sudden Lester FallsApart comes running in and says that ten Indians just got killed in a car wreck on Ford Canyon Road. Ten Skins? I asked Lester, and he said, Yeah, ten. And then Jimmy starts up singing, One little, two little, three little Indians, four little, five little, six little Indians, seven little, eight little, nine little Indians, ten little Indian boys.”

  Everyone in the wedding laughed some more, but also looked a little tense after that story, so I grabbed Raymond and led him back to his seat. He stared incredulously at me, tried to reconcile his recent eulogy with my sudden appearance. He just sat there until the preacher asked that most rhetorical of questions:

  “And if there is anyone here who has objections to this union, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Raymond staggered and stumbled to his feet, then staggered and stumbled up to the preacher.

  “Reverend,” Raymond said. “I hate to interrupt, but my cousin is dead, you know? I think that might be a problem.”

  Raymond passed out at that moment, and Norma and I were married with his body draped unceremoniously over our feet.

  Three months after Norma left me, I lay in my hospital bed in Spokane, just back from another stupid and useless radiation treatment.

  “Jesus,” I said to my attending physician. “A few more zaps and I’ll be Superman.”

  “Really?” the doctor said. “I never realized that Clark Kent was a Spokane Indian.”

  And we laughed, you know, because sometimes that’s all two people have in common.

  “So,” I asked her. “What’s my latest prognosis?”

  “Well,” she said. “It comes down to this. You’re dying.”

  “Not again,” I said.

  “Yup, Jimmy, you’re still dying.”

  And we laughed, you know, because sometimes you’d rather cry.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “I’ve got other patients to see.”

  As she walked out, I wanted to call her back and make an urgent confession, to ask forgiveness, to offer truth in return for salvation. But she was only a doctor. A good doctor, but still just a doctor.

  “Hey, Dr. Adams,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just wanted to hear your name. It sounds like drums to these heavily medicated Indian ears of mine.”

  And she laughed and I laughed, too. That’s what happened.

  Norma was the world champion fry bread maker. Her fry bread was perfect, like one of those dreams you wake up from and say, I didn’t want to wake up.

  “I think this is your best fry bread ever,” I told Norma one day. In fact, it was January 22.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now you get to wash the dishes.”

  So I was washing the dishes when the phone rang. Norma answered it and I could hear her half of the conversation.

  “Hello.”

  “Yes, this is Norma Many Horses.”

  “No.”

  “No!”

  “No!” Norma yelled as she threw the phone down and ran outside. I picked the receiver up carefully, afraid of what it might say to me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Who am I speaking to?” the voice on the other end asked.

  “Jimmy Many Horses. I’m Norma’s husband.”

  “Oh, Mr. Many Horses. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, uh, as I just told your wife, your mother-in-law, uh, passed away this morning.”

  “Thank you,” I said, hung up the phone, and saw that Norma had returned.

  “Oh, Jimmy,” she said, talking through tears.

  “I can’t believe I just said thank you to that guy,” I said. “What does that mean? Thank you that my mother-in-law is dead? Thank you that you told me that my mother-in-law is dead? Thank you that you told
me that my mother-in-law is dead and made my wife cry?”

  “Jimmy,” Norma said. “Stop. It’s not funny.”

  But I didn’t stop. Then or now.

  Still, you have to realize that laughter saved Norma and me from pain, too. Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.

  Once, a Washington State patrolman stopped Norma and me as we drove to Spokane to see a movie, get some dinner, a Big Gulp at 7-11.

  “Excuse me, officer,” I asked. “What did I do wrong?”

  “You failed to make proper signal for a turn a few blocks back,” he said.

  That was interesting because I had been driving down a straight highway for over five miles. The only turns possible were down dirt roads toward houses where no one I ever knew had lived. But I knew to play along with his game. All you can hope for in these little wars is to minimize the amount of damage.

  “I’m sorry about that, officer,” I said. “But you know how it is. I was listening to the radio, tapping my foot. It’s those drums, you know?”

  “Whatever,” the trooper said. “Now, I need your driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance.”

  I handed him the stuff and he barely looked at it. He leaned down into the window of the car.

  “Hey, chief,” he asked. “Have you been drinking?”

  “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “How about your woman there?”

  “Ask her yourself,” I said.

  The trooper looked at me, blinked a few seconds, paused for dramatic effect, and said, “Don’t you even think about telling me what I should do.”

  “I don’t drink, either,” Norma said quickly, hoping to avoid any further confrontation. “And I wasn’t driving anyway.”

  “That don’t make any difference,” the trooper said. “Washington State has a new law against riding as a passenger in an Indian car.”

  “Officer,” I said. “That ain’t new. We’ve known about that one for a couple hundred years.”

  The trooper smiled a little, but it was a hard smile. You know the kind.

  “However,” he said. “I think we can make some kind of arrangement so none of this has to go on your record.”

  “How much is it going to cost me?” I asked.

  “How much do you have?”

  “About a hundred bucks.”

  “Well,” the trooper said. “I don’t want to leave you with nothing. Let’s say the fine is ninety-nine dollars.”

  I gave him all the money, though, four twenties, a ten, eight dollar bills, and two hundred pennies in a sandwich bag.

  “Hey,” I said. “Take it all. That extra dollar is a tip, you know? Your service has been excellent.”

  Norma wanted to laugh then. She covered her mouth and pretended to cough. His face turned red. I mean redder than it already was.

  “In fact,” I said as I looked at the trooper’s badge. “I might just send a letter to your commanding officer. I’ll just write that Washington State Patrolman D. Nolan, badge number 13746, was polite, courteous, and above all, legal as an eagle.”

  Norma laughed out loud now.

  “Listen,” the trooper said. “I can just take you both in right now. For reckless driving, resisting arrest, threatening an officer with physical violence.”

  “If you do,” Norma said and jumped into the fun, “I’ll just tell everyone how respectful you were of our Native traditions, how much you understood about the social conditions that lead to the criminal acts of so many Indians. I’ll say you were sympathetic, concerned, and intelligent.”

  “Fucking Indians,” the trooper said as he threw the sandwich bag of pennies back into our car, sending them flying all over the interior. “And keep your damn change.”

  We watched him walk back to his cruiser, climb in, and drive off, breaking four or five laws as he flipped a U-turn, left rubber, crossed the center line, broke the speed limit, and ran through a stop sign without lights and siren.

  We laughed as we picked up the scattered pennies from the floor of the car. It was a good thing that the trooper threw that change back at us because we found just enough gas money to get us home.

  After Norma left me, I’d occasionally get postcards from powwows all over the country. She missed me in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. I just stayed on the Spokane Indian Reservation and missed her from the doorway of my HUD house, from the living room window, waiting for the day that she would come back.

  But that’s how Norma operated. She told me once that she would leave me whenever the love started to go bad.

  “I ain’t going to watch the whole thing collapse,” she said. “I’ll get out when the getting is good.”

  “You wouldn’t even try to save us?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t be worth saving at that point.”

  “That’s pretty cold.”

  “That’s not cold,” she said. “It’s practical.”

  But don’t get me wrong, either. Norma was a warrior in every sense of the word. She would drive a hundred miles round-trip to visit tribal elders in the nursing homes in Spokane. When one of those elders died, Norma would weep violently, throw books and furniture.

  “Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away,” she said. “And that hurts more because I don’t know how much of a future we have.”

  And once, when we drove up on a really horrible car wreck, she held a dying man’s head in her lap and sang to him until he passed away. He was a white guy, too. Remember that. She kept that memory so close to her that she had nightmares for a year.

  “I always dream that it’s you who’s dying,” she told me and didn’t let me drive the car for almost a year.

  Norma, she was always afraid; she wasn’t afraid.

  One thing that I noticed in the hospital as I coughed myself up and down the bed: A clock, at least one of those old-style clocks with hands and a face, looks just like somebody laughing if you stare at it long enough.

  The hospital released me because they decided that I would be much more comfortable at home. And there I was, at home, writing letters to my loved ones on special reservation stationery that read: FROM THE DEATH BED OF JAMES MANY HORSES, III.

  But in reality, I sat at my kitchen table to write, and DEATH TABLE just doesn’t have the necessary music. I’m also the only James Many Horses, but there is a certain dignity to any kind of artificial tradition.

  Anyway, I sat there at the death table, writing letters from my death bed, when there was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I yelled, knowing the door was locked, and smiled when it rattled against the frame.

  “It’s locked,” a female voice said and it was a female voice I recognized.

  “Norma?” I asked as I unlocked and opened the door.

  She was beautiful. She had either gained or lost twenty pounds, one braid hung down a little longer than the other, and she had ironed her shirt until the creases were sharp.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’m home.”

  I was silent. That was a rare event.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’ve been gone so long and I missed you so much. But now I’m back. Where I belong.”

  I had to smile.

  “Where are the kids?” she asked.

  “They’re asleep,” I said, recovered just in time to continue the joke. “Poor little guys tried to stay awake, you know? They wanted to be up when you got home. But, one by one, they dropped off, fell asleep, and I had to carry them off into their little beds.”

  “Well,” Norma said. “I’ll just go in and kiss them quietly. Tell them how much I love them. Fix the sheets and blankets so they’ll be warm all night.”

  She smiled.

  “Jimmy,” she said. “You look like shit.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m sorry I left.”

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked, though I didn’t really want to know.

 
“In Arlee. Lived with a Flathead cousin of mine.”

  “Cousin as in cousin? Or cousin as in I-was-fucking-him-but-don’t-want-to-tell-you-because-you’re-dying?”

  She smiled even though she didn’t want to.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess you’d call him more of that second kind of cousin.”

  Believe me: nothing ever hurt more. Not even my tumors which are the approximate size of baseballs.

  “Why’d you come back?” I asked her.

  She looked at me, tried to suppress a giggle, then broke out into full-fledged laughter. I joined her.

  “Well,” I asked her again after a while. “Why’d you come back?”

  She turned stoic, gave me that beautiful Tonto face, and said, “Because he was so fucking serious about everything.”

  We laughed a little more and then I asked her one more time, “Really, why’d you come back?”

  “Because someone needs to help you die the right way,” she said. “And we both know that dying ain’t something you ever done before.”

  I had to agree with that.

  “And maybe,” she said, “because making fry bread and helping people die are the last two things Indians are good at.”

  “Well,” I said. “At least you’re good at one of them.”

  And we laughed.

  INDIAN EDUCATION

  FIRST GRADE

  MY HAIR WAS TOO short and my U.S. Government glasses were horn-rimmed, ugly, and all that first winter in school, the other Indian boys chased me from one corner of the playground to the other. They pushed me down, buried me in the snow until I couldn’t breathe, thought I’d never breathe again.

  They stole my glasses and threw them over my head, around my outstretched hands, just beyond my reach, until someone tripped me and sent me falling again, facedown in the snow.

  I was always falling down; my Indian name was Junior Falls Down. Sometimes it was Bloody Nose or Steal-His-Lunch. Once, it was Cries-Like-a-White-Boy, even though none of us had seen a white boy cry.

  Then it was a Friday morning recess and Frenchy SiJohn threw snowballs at me while the rest of the Indian boys tortured some other top-yogh-yaught kid, another weakling. But Frenchy was confident enough to torment me all by himself, and most days I would have let him.