The Toughest Indian in the World

by Sherman Alexie

  Low Man believed the Coeur d’Alene Reservation to be a monotonous place—a wet kind of monotony that white tourists saw as spiritual and magic. Tourists snapped off dozens of photographs and tried to capture it—the wet, spiritual monotony—before they climbed back into their rental cars and drove away to the next reservation on their itineraries.

  The tourists didn’t know, and never would have guessed, that the reservation’s monotony might last for months, sometimes years, before one man would eventually pull a pistol from a secret place and shoot another man in the face, or before a group of women would drag another woman out of her house and beat her left eye clean out of her skull. After that first act of violence, rival families would issue calls for revenge and organize the retaliatory beatings. Afterward, three or four people would wash the blood from their hands and hide in the hills, causing white men to write editorials, all of this news immediately followed by capture, trial, verdict, and bus ride to prison. And then, only then, would the long silence, the monotony, resume.

  Walking through the Missoula airport, Low Man wondered if the Flathead Reservation was a dangerous place, if it was a small country where the king established a new set of laws with every sunrise.

  Carrying a suitcase and computer bag, Low Man searched for Carlotta’s face, her round, purple-dark face, in the crowd of people—most of them white men in cowboy hats—who waited at the gate. Instead, he saw an old Indian man holding a hardcover novel above his head.

  “I wrote that book,” Low Man said proudly to the old man, who stood with most of his weight balanced on his left hip.

  “You’re him, then,” said the old man. “The mystery writer.”

  “I am, then,” said Low Man.

  “I’m Carlotta's boss, Raymond. She sent me.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Ray. Where is she?”

  “My name is Raymond. And she’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah, gone.”

  Low Man wondered if gone carried a whole different meaning in the state of Montana. Perhaps, under the Big Sky, being gone meant that you were having lunch, or that your car had run out of gas, or that you’d broken your leg in a fly-fishing accident and were stranded in a hospital bed, doped up on painkillers, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the man you loved more than anything else in the world.

  “Where, exactly, is gone?” asked Low Man.

  The old man’s left eye was cloudy with glaucoma. Low Man wondered about the quality of Raymond’s depth perception.

  “She got married yesterday,” said the old man. “She and Chuck woke up before sunrise and drove for Flagstaff.”

  “Flagstaff?” asked Low Man, desperately trying to remember when he had last talked to Carlotta. When? Three days ago, for just a minute, to confirm the details of his imminent arrival.

  “Arizona?” Low Man asked.

  “Yeah, that’s where she and Chuck grew up.”

  “Who is Chuck?”

  “That’s her husband,” said Raymond.

  “Obviously.”

  Low Man needed a drink. He’d been sober for ten years, but he still needed a drink. Not of alcohol, no, but of something. He never worried about falling off the wagon, not anymore. He had spent many nights in hotel rooms where the mini-bars were filled with booze, but had given in only to the temptations of the three-dollar candy bars.

  “Ray,” said Low Man. “Can we, please, just put a hold on this conversation while I go find me a pop?”

  “Carlotta’s been sober for six years,” said the old man.

  “Yes, I know. That’s one of the reasons I came here.”

  “She told me you drank a lot of soda pop. Said it was your substitute addiction.”

  Shaking his head, Low Man found a snack bar, ordered a large soda, finished it with three swallows, and then ordered another.

  When he was working on a book, when he was writing, Low Man would drink a six-pack of soda every hour or so, and then, hopped up on the caffeine, he’d pound the keyboard, chapter after chapter, until carpal tunnel syndrome fossilized the bones in his wrists. There it was, the central dilemma of his warrior life: repetitive stress. In his day, Crazy Horse had to worry about Custer and the patriotic sociopaths of the Seventh Cavalry.

  “Okay,” said Low Man. “Now, tell me, please, Raymond, how long has Carlotta been planning on getting married?”

  “Oh, jeez,” said Raymond. “She wasn’t planning it at all. But Chuck showed up a couple days back, they were honeyhearts way back when, and just swept her off her feet. He’s been sober for eleven years.”

  “One more than me.”

  “Oh, yeah, but I don’t think that was the reason she married him.”

  “No, I imagine not.”

  “Well, I better get going. I got to pick up my grandchildren from school.”

  “Ray?”

  “It’s Raymond.”

  Low Man wondered what had happened to the Indian men who loved their nicknames, who earned their nicknames? His father had run around with indigenous legends named Bug, Mouse, Stubby, and Stink-Head.

  “You’re an elder, right?” Low Man asked Raymond.

  “Elder than some, not as elder as others.”

  “Elders know things, right?”

  “I know one or two things.”

  “Then perhaps, just perhaps, you could tell me what, what, what thing I’m supposed to do now?”

  Raymond scratched his head and pursed his lips.

  “Maybe,” said the elder. “You could sign my book for me?”

  Distracted, Low Man signed the book, but with his true signature and not with the stylized flourish he’d practiced for years. He signed it: Peace.

  “You’re a pretty good writer,” Raymond said. “You should keep doing it.”

  “I’ll try,” said Low Man as he watched the old Indian shuffle away.

  Low Man began to laugh, softly at first, but then with a full-throated roar that echoed off the walls. He laughed until tears ran down his face, until his stomach cramped, until he retched and threw up in a water fountain. He could not stop laughing, not even after three security officers arrived to escort him out of the airport, and not even after he’d walked three miles into town and found himself standing in a phone booth outside a 7-Eleven.

  “Shit,” he said and suddenly grew serious. “Who am I supposed to call?”

  Then he laughed a little more and wondered how he was going to tell this story in the future. He’d change the names of those involved, of course, and invent new personalities and characters—and brand-new desires as well—and then he would be forced to invert and subvert the chronology of events, and the tone of the story would certainly be tailored to fit the audience. Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons. Maybe Low Man would turn himself into a blue-collar Indian, a welder who’d quit a good job, who’d quit a loyal wife, to fly to Missoula in pursuit of a crazy white woman.

  And because he was a mystery writer, Low Man would have to throw a dead body into the mix.

  Whose body? Which weapon?

  Pistol, knife, poison, Low Man thought, as he stood in the phone booth outside the Missoula 7-Eleven.

  “Chuck?” he asked the telephone. “Who the fuck is Chuck?”

  The telephone didn’t answer.

  Low Man’s last book, Red Rain, had shipped 125,000 copies in hardcover, good enough to flirt with the New York Times best-seller list, before falling into the Kingdom of Remainders. He belonged to seven frequent-flier clubs, diligently tossed money into his SEP-IRA, and tried to ignore the ulcer just beginning to open a hole in his stomach.

  “Okay,” said Low Man as he stood in the telephone booth. “Crazy Horse didn’t need Tums. Okay? Think.”

  He took a deep breath. He wondered if the world was a cruel place. He checked the contents of his wallet. He carried two hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards, and a valid driver’s license, all the ingredients necessary for renti
ng a car and driving back to Seattle.

  He doubted they were going to let him back into the airport, a thought that made him break into more uncontrolled laughter.

  Jesus, he’d always wanted to be the kind of Indian who didn’t get kicked out of public places. He played golf, for God’s sake, with a single-digit handicap.

  Opening the phone book, Low Man looked for the local bookstores. He figured a small town like Missoula might have a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton’s, but he needed something more intimate and eccentric, even sacred. Low Man prayed for a used bookstore, a good one, a musty church filled with bibles written by thousands of disciples. There, in that kind of place, he knew that he could buy somebody’s novel or book of poems, then sit down in a comfortable chair to read, and maybe drink a cup of good coffee or a tall glass of the local water.

  He found the listing for a bookstore called Bread and Books. Beautiful. He tore the page out of the directory and walked into the 7-Eleven.

  “Hey,” said Low Man as he slapped the yellow page on the counter. “Where is this place?”

  The cashier, a skinny white kid, smiled.

  “You tore that out of the phone book, didn’t you?” asked the kid.

  “Yes, I did,” said Low Man.

  “You’re going to have to pay for that.”

  Low Man knew the telephone directory was free because merchants paid to advertise in the damn things.

  “Fine,” said Low Man and set his suitcase on the counter. “I’ll trade you this yellow page for everything inside this suitcase. Hell, you can have the suitcase, too, if you tell me where to find this place.”

  “Breads?”

  A good sign. It was a place popular enough to have a diminutive.

  “Yeah, do you read?” asked Low Man.

  “Of course.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Comic books.”

  “What kind of comics?”

  “Not comics,” said the kid. “Comic books.”

  “Okay,” said Low Man. “What kind of comic books?”

  “Good ones. Daredevil, Preacher, Love and Rockets, Astro City.”

  “Do you read mysteries?”

  “You mean, like, murder mysteries?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Well, I got a mystery for you anyway,” said Low Man as he pushed the suitcase a few inches across the counter, closer to the cashier.

  “This is a suitcase,” said Low Man.

  “I know it’s a suitcase.”

  “I just want you to know,” said Low Man as he patted the suitcase, as he tapped a slight rhythm against the lock. “I just need you to understand, understand this, understand that there are only two kinds of suitcase.”

  “Really?” asked the cashier. He was making only six bucks an hour, not enough to be speaking metaphysically with a total stranger, and an Indian stranger at that.

  “There is the empty suitcase,” said Low Man. “And there is the full suitcase. And what I have here is a full suitcase. And I want to give it to you.”

  “Mister,” said the kid. “You don’t have to give me your suitcase. I’ll tell you where Breads is. Hell, Missoula is a small town. You could find it by accident.”

  “But the thing is, I need you to take me there.”

  “I’m working.”

  “I know you’re working,” said Low Man. “But I figure that car, that shit-bag Camaro out there is yours. So I figure you can close this place down for a few minutes and give me a ride. You give me a ride and I’ll give you this suitcase and all of its contents.”

  There was a pistol, a revolver, sitting in a dark place beneath the cash register.

  “I can’t close,” said the cashier. He believed in rules, in order. “This is 7-Eleven. We’re supposed to be open, like, all the time. Look outside, the sign says twenty-four hours. I mean, I had to work last Christmas.”

  “Sweetheart,” said Low Man. “I’m older than you, so I remember when 7-Eleven used to be open from seven in the morning until eleven at night. That’s why they called it 7-Eleven. Get it? Open from seven to eleven? So, why don’t you and I get nostalgic, and pretend it’s 1973, and close the store long enough for you to drive me to the bookstore?”

  “Mister,” said the kid. “Even if this was 1973, and even if this store was only open from seven to eleven, it would still be three in the afternoon, like it is right now, and I would still not close down.”

  “Son, son, son,” said Low Man, losing his patience. “What if I told you there was a dead body inside this suitcase?”

  The cashier blinked, but remained calm. He had once shot a deer in the heart at two hundred yards, and bragged about it, though he’d been aiming for the head, the trophy hunter’s greatest sin.

  “That suitcase is too small. You couldn’t fit a body in there,” said the kid.

  “Fair enough,” said Low Man. “What if there’s just a head?”

  The cashier ran through the 7-Eleven employee’s handbook in his memory, searching for the proper way to deal with a crazy customer, a man who may or may not have a dead man—or pieces of a dead man—in his suitcase, but who most definitely had a thing for bookstores. The cashier had always been a good employee; his work ethic was quite advanced for somebody so young. But there was no official company policy, no corporate ethic, when it came to dealing with a man—an Indian man—who had so much pain illuminating both of his eyes.

  “Mister,” said the cashier, forced to improvise. “This is Montana. Everybody’s got a gun. Including me. And since you aren’t from Montana, and I can tell that by looking at you, then you most likely don’t have a gun.”

  “Your point being?”

  “I’m going to shoot you in the ass if you don’t exit the store immediately.”

  “Fine,” said Low Man. “You can keep the damn bag anyway.”

  Leaving his suitcase behind, Low Man walked out of the store. He still carried his computer case and the yellow page with Bread and Books’ address.

  In the 7-Eleven, the cashier waited until the Indian was out of sight before he carefully opened the suitcase to find two pairs of shoes, a suit jacket, four shirts, two pairs of pants, and assorted socks and underwear. He also found a copy of Red Rain and discovered Low Man’s photograph on the back of the book.

  Away from that black-and-white image taken fifty pounds earlier, Low Man walked until he stumbled across the Barnes and Noble superstore filling up one corner of an ugly strip mall.

  Fucking colonial clipper ships are everywhere, thought Low Man, even in Missoula, Montana. But he secretly loved the big green boats, mostly because they sold tons of his books.

  Low Man stepped into the store, found the mystery section, gathered all the copies of his books, soft and hard, and carried them to the information desk.

  “I want to sign these,” he said to the woman working there.

  “Why?”

  “Because I wrote them.”

  “Oh,” said the woman, immediately dropping into some highly trained and utterly pleasant demeanor. Perhaps everybody in Missoula, Montana, loved their jobs. “Please, let me get the manager. She’ll be glad to help you.”

  “Hold on,” said Low Man as he handed her the yellow page. “Do you know where this place is?”

  “Breads?”

  There it was again, the place with the nickname. Everybody must go there. At that moment, there could be dozens of people in Breads. Low Man wondered if there was a woman, a lovely woman in the bookstore, a lonely woman who would drag him back to her house and make love to him without removing any of her clothes.

  “Is it a good store?” asked Low Man.

  “I used to work there,” she said. “It closed down a month ago.”

  Low Man wondered if her eyes changed color when she mourned.

  “The kid at 7-Eleven didn’t tell me that.”

  “Oh,” said the woman, completely confused. She was young, just months out
of some small Montana town like Wolf Point or Harlem or Ronan, soon to return. “Well, let me get the manager.”

  “Wait,” said Low Man, handing her his computer case. “I found this over in the mystery section.”

  He’d purchased the computer case through a catalogue, and had regretted it ever since. The bag was bulky, heavy, poorly designed.

  “Thank you. I’ll put it in Lost and Found.”

  Low Man’s computer was an outdated Apple, its hard drive stuffed to the brim with three unpublished mystery novels and hundreds of programs and applications that he’d never used after downloading them.

  Free of his possessions, Low Man waited. He watched the men and women move through the bookstore.

  He wondered what Missoula meant, if there’d been some cavalry soldier named Missoula who’d made this part of the world safe for white people. He wondered if he could kill somebody, an Indian or a white soldier, and what it would feel like. He wondered if he would cry when he had to wash blood from his hands.

  He studied the faces of the white people in the store. He decided to choose the one that he would kill if he were forced to kill. Not the woman with the child, and certainly not the child, but maybe the man reading movie magazines, and, most likely, the old man asleep in the poetry-section chair.

  Low Man stared at the gold band on the dead man’s left hand. Low Man was still staring when the dead man woke up and walked out of the store.

  Low Man had been married twice, to a Lummi woman and a Yakama woman, and had fathered three kids, one each with his ex-wives, the third the result of a one-night stand with a white woman in Santa Fe. He sent money and books to his Indian children, but he hadn’t seen his white kid in ten years.

  “Mr. Smith, Low Man Smith?” asked the Barnes and Noble manager upon her arrival in Low Man’s world. She was blond, blue-eyed, plain.

  “Please,” he said. “Call me Chuck.”