The Toughest Indian in the World

by Sherman Alexie

  Roman sat in silence. He hated wooden chairs.

  “Mr. Furry,” she said.

  “I’m not a hamster,” said Roman.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name is not Furry. It’s not Hairy or Hirsute either. My name is Fury, as in righteous anger.”

  “You don’t have to be so impolite.”

  “You don’t have to mispronounce my name.”

  “Well, Mr. Fury,” she said, feeling somehow smaller in the presence of a boy who was twenty years younger. “You can go in now. Mr. Williams will see you.”

  “Assuming that he has eyes, I’m sure that’s an anatomical possibility.”

  Roman stepped into another office and sat in another wooden chair across a large oak desk from Mr. Williams, a white man who studied, or pretended to study, the contents of a file folder.

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Williams, as if the guttural were an important part of his vocabulary.

  “Yes,” said Roman, because he wanted to be the first one to use a word actually found in Webster’s Dictionary, Ninth Edition.

  “Well,” said Mr. Williams. “Let me see here. It says here in your file that you’re eighteen years old, a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, valedictorian of Wellpinit High School on said reservation, captain of the chess, math, history, and basketball teams, accepted on full academic scholarship to St. Jerome the Second University here in Spokane.”

  “Yes,” said Roman, with the same inflection as before.

  “That’s quite the all-American résumé, Mr. Fury.”

  “No, I think it’s more of an all-Native American résumé.”

  Mr. Williams smiled. His teeth, skin, and pinstriped suit were all the same shade of gray. Roman couldn’t tell where the three-season wool ended and where the man began.

  “Roman Gabriel Fury,” said Williams. “Quite an interesting name.”

  “Normally, I’d say thank you, sir, but I don’t think that was a sincere compliment, was it?”

  “Just an observation, young Mr. Fury. I am very good with observation. In fact, at this very moment, I am observing the fact that your parents are absent. A very distressing observation, to be sure, considering our specific request that your mother and father attend this meeting with you.”

  “Sir, my parents are dead. If you’d read my file in its entirety, you might have observed that.”

  Mr. Williams’s eyes flashed with anger, the first display of any color. He flipped through the file, searching for the two words that would confirm the truth: deceased, deceased.

  At that moment, if Roman had closed his eyes, he could have seen the yellow headlights of the red truck that smashed head-on into his father’s blue Chevy out on Reservation Road. He could have remembered that his father was buried in a brown suit. At that moment, if Roman had closed his eyes, he could have seen his mother’s red blood coughed into the folds of a white handkerchief. Roman was three years old when his mother was buried in a purple dress. He barely remembered her.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Williams. “I see now. Your grandmother has been your guardian for the last three years. Why didn’t she come?”

  “She doesn’t speak much English, sir.”

  “And yet, you speak English so well, speak it well enough to score in the ninety-ninth percentile in the verbal section of our little test. Quite an amazing feat for someone from, well, let’s call it a modest background.”

  “I’ve never been accused of modesty.”

  “No, I would guess not,” said Williams, setting the file down on his desk. He picked up a Mont Blanc pen as if it were a weapon.

  “But I guess you’ve been called arrogant,” added Williams. “And, perhaps, calculating?”

  “Calculating enough for a ninety-nine on the math section of your little test,” Roman said. He really hated wooden chairs.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Williams. “A nearly perfect score. In fact, the second-highest score ever for a Native American. Congratulations.”

  “Normally, I’d say thank you, sir, but I don’t think that was a sincere compliment, was it?”

  Mr. Williams leaned across his desk, straightened his back, placed his hands flat on either side of his desk, took a deep breath, exhaled, and made himself larger. He owned all ten volumes of Harris Brubaker’s How to Use Body Language to Destroy Your Enemies.

  “Son,” said Williams, using what Brubaker considered to be the second-most effective diminutive. “We’ve been informed there were certain irregularities in your test-taking process.”

  “Could you be more specific, sir?”

  “You were twenty minutes late for the test.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I also understand that your test-taking apparel was, to say the least, quite distracting.”

  Roman smiled. He’d worn his red, yellow, white, and blue grass-dance outfit while taking the test—highly unusual, to say the least—but he had used two standard number-two pencils, as specified in the rule book.

  “There’s nothing in the rule book about a dress code,” said Roman.

  “No, no, there’s not. But I certainly would enjoy an explanation.”

  “My grandmother told me your little test was culturally biased,” said Roman. “And that I might need a little extra power to do my best. I was going to bring my favorite drum group and let them sing a few honor songs, but I thought the non-Indians in the room might get a little, as you say, distracted.”

  “Power?” asked Williams, using Harris Brubaker’s favorite word.

  Roman stood and leaned across the desk. He’d read Brubaker’s first volume, had found it derivative and ambiguous, and never bothered to read any of the others.

  “Well, you see, sir,” said Roman. “The thing is, I was exhausted from having to walk seventy-five miles to get from my reservation to Spokane for the test, because my grandmother and I are too poor to afford a dependable car.”

  “You hitchhiked?” asked Williams.

  “Oh, no, hitchhiking would mean that I actually got a ride. But people don’t pick up Indians much, you know?”

  “Do you expect me to believe you walked seventy-five miles?”

  “Well, that’s the way it is,” said Roman. “Anyway, I get to the city, but then I have to run thirty blocks to get to the private high school where they’re giving the test, because I had enough money for lunch or a bus, but not both, and sometimes you have to make hard choices.

  “And then, once I got to the private high school, I had to convince the security guard, who looked suspiciously like a member of the Seventh Cavalry, that I was there to take the test, and not to vandalize the place. And hey, thank God I wasn’t wearing my grass-dance outfit yet because he might have shot me down on the spot.

  “Anyway, once I got past him, I was, as you observed, twenty minutes late. So I ran into a bathroom, changed into my grass-dance outfit, then sat down with your little test, realizing belatedly that I was definitely the only Injun in the room, and aside from the black kid in the front row and the ambiguously ethnic chick in the back, the only so-called minority in the room, and that frightened me more than you will ever know.

  “But I crack open the test anyway, and launch into some three-dimensional calculus problem, which is written in French translated from the Latin translated from the Phoenician or some other Godawful language that only white people seem to find relevant or useful, and I’m thinking, I am Crazy Horse, I am Geronimo, I am Sitting Bull, and I’m thinking the required number-two pencil is a bow and arrow, that every math question is Columbus, that every essay question is Custer, and I’m going to kill them dead.

  “So, anyway, I’m sure I flunk the damn test, because I’m an Indian from the reservation, and I can’t be that smart, right? I mean, I’m the first person in my family to ever graduate from high school, so who the hell do I think I am, trying to go to college, right? So, I take the test and I did kill it. I killed it, I killed it, I killed it.

  “And now, you want to take it away f
rom me, a poor, disadvantaged, orphan minority who only wants to go to the best college possible and receive an excellent Catholic, liberal arts education, improve his life, and provide for his elderly, diabetic grandmother who has heroically taken care of him in Third World conditions.

  “And, now, after all that, you want to take my score away from me? You want to change the rules after I learned them and beat them? Is that what you really want to do?”

  Mr. Williams smiled, but none of his teeth showed.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Roman as he turned away from the desk. He stepped through one door, walked past a woman who’d decided to hate him, and then ran.

  As a high school senior, Grace Atwater had also been accepted into St. Jerome the Second University, not because of her grades, which were only average, but because she’d obtained those average grades at the Pierpoint School, one of the most exclusive private high schools in the country. Grace was the only Native American to ever attend Pierpoint, but she’d always known her Indian blood had nothing to do with her admittance. Her mother, Ge Kuo, the Chinese-American daughter of parents who’d never left China, had been the music teacher for twenty-three years. Still, to her credit, Grace had worked hard, fought her way past an undiagnosed case of dyslexia, and surprised everybody with a perfect score on the CAT—the highest score ever for a Native American. She’d also submitted a personal essay that had surprised the St. Jerome admissions board.

  To Whom It May Concern, began Grace’s essay. This is the invocation I want to hear if I am accepted into your wonderful institution:

  Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to St. Jerome the Second University, or as we affectionately call it, Saint Junior.

  You are a very special group of students. In fact, the very best this great country has to offer. This year’s incoming freshman class has an average high school grade point average of 3.81.

  You have an average CAT score of 1280. Among you are forty-two American Merit Scholars.

  One hundred and ten of you were president of your senior class. Seventy-five of you were president of your student body.

  One hundred and sixty-two of you won varsity letters in various athletic endeavors. Sixty-three of you have received full athletic scholarships and will compete for St. Junior’s in basketball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, and track.

  You have excelled. You have triumphed. You have worked hard and been rewarded for your exemplary efforts. You have been admitted to one of the finest institutions of higher education in the world. Please, give yourself a hand.

  Good, good. Now I want you to hold out your right hand, palm up.

  Now, I want you to think hard about all that you have accomplished so far in your young lives. I want you to think about all the trophies on your mantels and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the news clippings in your scrapbooks and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the letters on your jackets and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all of your accolades and rewards and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. Can you see them? Can you imagine them? Can you feel them?

  Good, good. Now, I want you to crush all of that in your fist. I want you to grind it into dust and throw all of it away.

  Because none of it means anything now. Today is your new birthday. Your new beginning. And I am here to tell you that twenty-five percent of you will not make it through your freshman year. I am here to tell you that more than forty percent of you will not graduate from this university. I am here to tell you that all of you will engage in some form of illicit activity or another. In premarital sex, in drug and alcohol abuse, in academic dishonesty and plagiarism. And you will tell lies. To yourselves, to each other, to your professors, to your confessors, to me. Most of you will fall in love and all of you will not be loved enough. And through all the pain and loneliness, through all the late hours and early mornings, you will learn.

  Yes, you will grow from the frightened and confused teenagers you are now into the slightly less frightened and slightly less confused adults you will become.

  I am Father Arnold, President of St. Jerome the Second University. May God bless you in all of your various journeys.

  Three weeks before Grace left for St. Jerome, her mother died of breast cancer. Grace had never known her father—he’d fallen off a building and was buried in the foundation of the Rockefeller National Bank Building. When she was sixteen, Grace had opened up a savings account there and, without fail, had deposited one hundred dollars a month.

  After they’d graduated together from St. Junior, Grace and Roman were married in a quick Reno, Nevada, ceremony and then flew to Greenland where Roman played shooting guard for a horrible team called the Whales. They won two and lost thirty-five that first season, despite Roman’s twenty points and ten assists a game. The next year, the Whales won their first five games before the entire league went bankrupt. Grace and Roman then moved on to twelve other countries and nineteen other basketball teams in ten years before she’d woken up one bright morning in a Hilton Hotel in Madrid, Spain, with the sure knowledge that she wanted to return to the United States.

  “Roman, are you awake?”

  “I think it’s time for us to go home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ve done all you can do over here.”

  She’d supported him, emotionally and spiritually, had traveled with him to more places than she cared to remember. She’d eaten great food and had been food-poisoned six different times—she couldn’t look at a mushroom without retching—and she was reasonably fluent in five different languages. How many Indians could say that? She’d watched every minute of every one of his games—only God knows how many—and had held him equally tight after good and bad performances.

  She had never loved him because he was a basketball player. In fact, she’d loved him despite the fact that he was a basketball player. She’d always understood that his need to prove and test his masculinity was some genetic throwback. Given the choice, he’d rather have been a buffalo hunter and soldier killer than the point guard for the Lakers, but there was no such choice, of course. He couldn’t be an indigenous warrior or a Los Angeles Laker. He was an Indian man who’d invented a new tradition for himself, a manhood ceremony that had usually provided him with equal amounts of joy and pain, but his ceremony had slowly and surely become archaic. Though she’d never tell him such a thing, she’d suspected his ceremony might have been archaic from the beginning. After all, the root word for warrior was war, and he’d always been a peaceful and kind man, a man who’d refused to join anybody’s army, most especially if they were fighting and killing for something he believed in.

  “You have lost the moment you pick up a gun,” he’d always said. “When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”

  Lying together in that Madrid Hilton Hotel, with its tiny European bathroom and scratchy sheets, she’d realized how much she loved her idealistic and pompous husband.

  “Let’s go home,” she’d said to him again.

  “Why?” he’d asked.

  “Because I want to,” she’d said to him again as he stood naked from the bed and walked across the thin carpet.

  No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

  All during that time, during his domestic and foreign basketball career, she’d been writing stories, poems, essays, and the first few chapters of various failed novels. She’d never told Roman about her writing because she’d wanted to keep something for herself; she’d wanted to enjoy a secret, perhaps sacred, endeavor, and writing seemed to be her best vocation and avocation. Under various pseudonyms, she’d published work in dozens of the various university literary journals back in the United States, though she’d never bothered to read any of her writing after it had been published. She didn’t even bother to keep originals, preferring to start all over with
the first word of each new poem, story, or essay.

  “Let’s go home,” she’d said to him as he stood at the window of the Madrid Hilton. He was naked and thin and would never be that lovely again.

  “I’m afraid,” he’d said.

  “Of what?”

  “I’m afraid I won’t know how to do anything else.”

  There, in Spain, he’d stood naked in the window and wept.

  No habla Español. Indios de Norte Americanos.

  “What if basketball is all I will ever be good at?”

  “Hey,” she’d said. “You’re not even that good a basketball player.”

  “Ouch,” he’d said and laughed. They’d laughed together, though both of them had a secret. His: he’d hated her, ever so briefly, for telling the truth about his failed dreams. Hers: she’d hated herself, ever so briefly, for devoting her life to his dreams.

  Both of them had locked their secrets in dark boxes, never to be opened, and caught the next plane back to the United States.

  On the Spokane Indian Reservation, on the morning of that first snow, Roman sat down to piss. He could hear the television playing in the living room. He could hear Michael Jordan’s voice.

  I’m back.

  Sure, Roman could have stood and pissed. That would have been easier, more convenient. Just pull it out and blast away. But he wanted to be polite, even kind to Grace. That was exactly what was missing in most marriages: politeness, courtesy, good manners. He was the kind of man who wrote thank-you notes to his wife for the smallest favors.

  After years of marriage, Roman had learned one basic truth: It was easy to make another person happy.

  To make Grace happy, Roman sat down to piss, did the dishes at least three times a week, vacuumed every day, and occasionally threw a load of laundry into the washer, though he’d often forgotten to transfer the wet clothes into the dryer. No matter. Grace didn’t sweat the small stuff, and with each passing day she loved him more and more.