The Toughest Indian in the World: Stories

by Sherman Alexie

  “The soldiers are coming,” I said to my mother. “We have to hide.”

  “Where are we going to hide?” she asked. She thought we were playing a game. She covered my face and eyes with the thick curtain of her hair.

  “I can’t see,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “If you can’t see the soldiers, they can’t see you.”

  She was wrong. I could have seen those soldiers if I had been blind from birth. Flames rose from their footprints.

  “We can hide between the walls,” I said. “Or beneath the floor.”

  “Like Anne Frank,” said my mother.

  “No,” I said. “She didn’t hide good enough.”

  I knew the long history of children who had been forced to hide in clumsy places and were subsequently discovered.

  “Hush, hush,” said my mother.

  “We’re going to die,” I said.

  “Don’t say that,” said my mother. “Don’t ever say that.”

  I looked up into the salt seas of her eyes. She was my mother, my priest, my chair in the confessional. I sat in her lap and whispered in her ear.

  “Please,” I said. “Believe me.”

  My mother was supposed to be stronger than I would ever be. She was supposed to convince me that my dream was not real. She was supposed to tell me that the enemy soldiers were marching only through the killing fields of my imagination. She was supposed to heal me. All of my life, she had healed me whenever I was ill.

  “Jonah,” she said, using my name as she might have used aspirin or penicillin. “It was a dream.”

  “There was so much blood,” I said. “A whole river of blood. And the Indians were trying to swim through it. Trying to swim for home. But the soldiers kept pulling us out of the water. They skinned us and hung us up to dry. Then they ate us up. They ate every one of us. And they ate every part of us. Except our skins. They fed our skins to the dogs. And the dogs were fighting over our skins. Just growling and fighting. It’s true.”

  “Oh, Jonah,” said my mother. “It was just a nightmare.”

  “It’s real,” I said and wept. “I know it’s real.”

  “Oh, Jonah,” said my mother as she wept with me.

  We were still weeping together at the kitchen table when my father returned from the night shift at the mine. He stared at us with dark eyes. His black hair was cut close to his scalp. His face was a relief map: rivers of scars, the desert floor of skin, and the badlands of wrinkles. With tremendous power and grace, he strode across the kitchen toward us. He was a huge man whose clothes never seemed to fit him correctly. My father placed his left hand on my mother’s shoulder and his right hand on my head.

  Though my father was a bad carpenter, he had always been a clever magician. I knew he could conjure up different spells with each hand. His left hand made my mother’s back arch in the night. His right hand pulled down ripe apples from the surprised pine trees. His left hand made the sky open up and rain. His right hand started fires when he snapped his fingers. When he clasped his hands together in prayer, or slapped them together in applause, the distance between the earth and moon changed.

  On that morning, when my father set his left hand on my mother’s shoulder and his right on my head, I knew he was trying to stop our crying. I wanted him to stop the war from coming. But my mother and I continued to weep, and I knew the enemy soldiers continued to march toward us.

  “What’s wrong?” asked my father, feeling powerless.

  “He had a nightmare,” said my mother. “He thinks a war is coming.”

  “Then why are you crying?” he asked her.

  “He’s scaring me.”

  My father wrapped his huge arms around his wife and son. He had no magic left in his hands. Bright tears fell from my father’s eyes and burned the kitchen table. He raised his face toward the ceiling and the sky beyond it, and opened his mouth to sing or scream. He was afraid too, for reasons he did not understand.

  My dream of war filled the room like oxygen. The three of us breathed it in and choked on it. We tasted it. It tasted like salt; it tasted like blood.

  I don’t know how long the three of us wept together. Minutes or hours could have passed. I burrowed into my mother and father. I wanted to hide between the walls of their ribs or beneath the floors of their hearts.

  “Wait,” my father said after a long time. “Listen.”

  My mother and I listened. We heard a storm approaching.

  “Thunder,” said my mother.

  “Lightning,” said my father.

  “War,” I said.

  “Rain,” said my mother.

  “Dark clouds,” said my father.

  “War,” I said.

  “Floods,” said my mother.

  “Famine,” said my father.

  “War,” I said.

  Together, my parents and I stepped into our front yard and stared up into the sky. We saw the big planes roar noisily through the rough air above the reservation. We saw the soldiers step from the bellies of those planes and drop toward the earth. We saw a thousand parachutes open into a thousand green blossoms. All over the Spokane Indian Reservation, all over every reservation in the country, those green blossoms fell onto empty fields, onto powwow grounds, and onto the roofs of tribal schools and health clinics. Those green blossoms fell between pine trees, beside deep and shallow rivers, and among the sacred and utilitarian headstones of our dead.

  My parents and I watched one green blossom float down into our front yard. Then one more, and another, and a fourth. A fifth and sixth. The seventh landed in the back of our wagon.

  A garden of parachutes.

  With rifles raised, the soldiers advanced on us. I saw four white faces, two black faces, and a face that looked like mine.

  “Step away from the house!” shouted the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “And lie facedown on the ground!”

  My parents and I did as we were told. As I was lying on the grass, I watched an ant carry the dead body of another ant.

  I was afraid.

  I knew that other soldiers, white ones, black ones, and ones who looked like me, were parachuting onto every reservation in the country.

  I could hear one million Indians holding their breath.

  On our reservation, other soldiers soon arrived and swarmed into the house. I didn’t know what they were looking for.

  “Your names!” a black soldier shouted at our backs as he stood above us. I couldn’t tell if he was making a statement or asking a question.

  “What are your names?” asked the black soldier.

  “We’re the Lots,” said my father. Still on the ground, I turned my head to look at my father’s face, but his head was turned the other way. I turned back to look at my mother’s face and saw that her eyes were closed tight. I wondered if she was praying.

  “Joseph, Sarah, and Jonah Lot?” asked the black soldier. He knew our names.

  “What are your names?” I asked.

  “Quiet,” said the black soldier. I could hear the fear in his voice. He was afraid of us, or perhaps he was afraid of what was happening to the world, to him. He was the kind of soldier who had always followed orders, who had never questioned them, and who now did not know how to change at the moment when he desired, more than anything, to change.

  Rifle shots in the distance. The earth trembled because somebody beautiful was running. Then more rifle shots. The wind shrieked because somebody beautiful was falling. Then more rifle shots. The earth trembled because somebody beautiful had fallen into dust. Then silence for twelve seconds. I counted them. One second, I inhaled. Two seconds, I exhaled. Six seconds, I inhaled. Seven seconds, I exhaled. Eleven seconds, I inhaled. Twelve seconds, I exhaled. Then one final rifle shot.

  “What is your name?” I asked the black soldier. He ignored me.

  “Are you Joseph, Sarah, and Jonah Lot?” asked the soldier. Tears were running down his face.

  “Yes,” said my father.

  “Joseph i
s full-blood Coeur d’Alene, Sarah is full-blood Spokane,” the black soldier said to a white soldier. “The Coeur d’Alene and Spokane are both Interior Salish tribes, so there should be no problem of contamination with the child.”

  I heard the word contamination and cried out. I thought of disease, of deadly viruses floating invisibly through the air.

  “Are there any other children?” asked the white soldier.

  “No,” said the black soldier. “The child was supposed to be a twin, but the other baby was stillborn.”

  My mother gasped. I wondered if her body had remembered the pain of my birth, and the greater pain of giving birth to my dead brother.

  “What is this about?” asked my father. I could hear the fear in his voice. He tried to disguise it as anger. He turned his head to look at me. I could see the fear in his face. I’d never been more afraid of the fear in any man’s eyes.

  “Quiet,” said a white soldier as he kicked my father in the ribs.

  “Careful,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “Don’t draw blood.”

  Contamination.

  A white soldier suddenly pulled me to my feet and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were an impossible green.

  “Don’t hurt my baby,” begged my mother.

  “What was your brother’s name?”

  “His name was Joseph,” I said. “Same as my dad.”

  The white soldier nodded his head as if he’d known it all along.

  “Leave him alone!” shouted my father as he tried to rise from the ground. A white soldier smashed him back down with the butt of his rifle. My father bled into the dirt.

  “Damn it,” said the soldier-who-looked-like-me. “I told you. No blood.”

  Contamination.

  The red glow poured from my father’s nose and mouth. My mother clawed at the dirt as if she thought she could escape by digging a tunnel.

  “Jonah,” said the white soldier. “We don’t mean to hurt you. Or your parents.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “You’re going to eat us. You’re going to drink our blood.”

  The white soldier’s face grew harder. Marble, granite, quartz.

  “Jonah,” he said. “We’ve come to take you away from here. We need you.”

  “I knew you were coming,” I said.

  My father tried to breathe through his shattered nose and mouth. My mother pressed her face into the ground and wore it like a mask.

  I bit deeply into my palm.

  “I surrender,” I said to the white soldier as I offered my bloodied hand to him.

  War is a church.

  In my church, my mother and father were frozen in the stained-glass window above the altar. The red glass of my father’s bloody face was cradled by the blue glass of my mother’s dress.

  Memory is a church on fire.

  In my church, a soldier dropped a lighted match at the wooden feet of a crucified Jesus and watched the fire wrap around the savior like a shroud. Flames lifted away from Jesus’ body like angels and blessed the parched pews, threadbare curtains, and brittle hymnal books. Two rows of flames sang in the choir box. Flames climbed up the altar and walls to embrace my stained-glass parents.

  The glass darkened with smoke.

  The glass melted in the fire.

  The glass exploded in the heat.

  My parents’ faces fell to pieces in my mind only moments after those soldiers landed in our front yard. I began to forget pieces of my parents’ faces only moments after I was taken from them. By the time I was loaded into a school bus with twenty other kids from the reservation, I could remember only the dark of my mother’s eyes and the curve of my father’s jaw. By the time our bus crossed the border of the reservation, taking us away from what we had known and into what we could never have predicted, I had forgotten almost every piece of my parents’ faces. I touched my face, remembering that its features owed their shapes to the shapes of my parents’ faces, but I felt nothing familiar. I was strange and foreign.

  Outside the bus, the landscape was familiar. With my parents, in our horse-drawn wagon, I had often traveled along that highway from the Spokane Indian Reservation into the city of Spokane. The blacktop road split the wheat fields into halves. On one side, irrigation equipment stepped like giant insects across the field. On the other side, a white farmer sat in a still tractor. He watched our bus slowly pass from left to right across his horizon. Farther along, a tribe of starlings perched in one pine tree. I raised my hand to wave a greeting to them and one thousand birds lifted simultaneously into flight. The grain silos were painted with the names of ghost towns. Those silos could have been the tombstones of giants. Red lights blinked at the tops of radio antenna towers. An orphaned stretch of barbed-wire fence was partially submerged in a roadside pond.

  Suddenly, everything looked dangerous. Sharp stars ripped through the fabric of the morning sky. Morning dew boiled and cooked green leaves. Sun dogs snarled and snapped at one another. The vanishing point was the tip of a needle.

  Inside the bus, a dozen soldiers stood in the aisle between the seats. Another soldier drove the bus. I counted them again and again. There were ten white soldiers, two black soldiers, and the soldier-who-looked-like-me. I sat a few seats behind the black soldier who was driving the bus. In the back, Arlene and Kim, the Cox twins, hugged each other and wailed. Farther forward, the five Juniors, four boys and one girl, pushed their faces against the windows. There were two boys named James—one who went by Jimmy and one who went by Jamie—and three Johns. Jimmy was the chess player and Jamie was dyslexic. The three Johns hated one another. Randy Peone, the green-eyed Spokane, was shouting curses in English and Salish, the languages of our tribe. A white soldier quickly pinned Randy to his seat, tied his arms behind his back, and covered his mouth with duct tape. There were three Kateris, all named after the Mohawk woman who was canonized when her smallpox scars disappeared. Two of the Kateris prayed quietly, while the third had long ago discarded her faith and was now trying to pry a spring loose from her seat to use as a weapon. Teddy, who had a white father, sat with his half-brother, Tyrone, who had a black father. Billy the Retard was smiling. I wondered if this new world was the world he’d been living in all along and if he was now happy that the rest of the Indian kids had finally joined him. Sam the Indian, who was really white, trembled in the seat across the aisle from me.

  “Jonah, is it real?” asked Sam the Indian. He was a small boy, the subject of a thousand reservation schoolyard taunts, but none of that mattered in the bus. At that moment, as we all traveled together down the longest highway in tribal history, Sam the Indian was instantly loved and beloved by all of the Indians on that bus. Sam the Indian was a white child who loved Indians, who had come to live among us, and who had never been allowed to learn any of our secrets. As we Indians cowered in our seats, we all made silent apologies to Sam. We all said silent prayers for his safety because we had all, collectively and unconsciously, just decided that Sam’s pale skin contained some kind of magic. We thought the white soldiers would notice Sam’s white skin and call him brother. We thought they’d lift Sam to their shoulders in celebration, in some kind of strange and raucous ceremony, and carry him away while all of us Indian children made our escape. We all thought Sam could save us, but I was the only one who spoke to him.

  “Help us,” I said to Sam.

  Sam did not understand.

  “Jonah,” he said. “Is this real?”

  “It’s real,” I said.

  “Quiet,” said the white soldier standing between us.

  Sam the Indian looked from me to the soldier and back to me.

  “Why is it real?” asked Sam the Indian.

  “Quiet,” said the white soldier again without looking at us. I was happy I didn’t have to answer Sam’s question. I’m not sure what I would have said. And if I had told the truth, if I had given Sam an answer that was close to the truth, I might have lost all hope and faith. I might have closed my eyes and never opened them agai
n.

  “Why is it real?” asked Sam again.

  “Shut up,” said the white soldier. He swallowed hard. I wondered if he hated us. I couldn’t see any obvious hate in his blue eyes. I studied the eyes of all of the soldiers. Five of the white soldiers had blue eyes, one had green, one had hazel, and the other had brown. One of the black soldiers had light brown eyes but I couldn’t see the eyes of the other black soldier, who was driving the bus.

  I studied the face of the soldier-who-looked-like-me. He was the tallest soldier. He had a cross tattooed on the back of his right hand. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen. He had brown eyes and skin. His hair was blacker than mine. He had a thin purple scar that arced from the corner of his left eye back toward his ear. His eyes passed over me as he scanned the faces of his prisoners. It was not enough. I wanted him to study my face as carefully as I was studying his face. I wanted him to tell me why he was a soldier holding a rifle instead of a fellow prisoner sitting in the seat beside me. I wanted to know the story of his scar.

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked as I stood in my seat.

  “Quiet,” said that white soldier for the third time as he pushed me back down.

  I rose again.

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked.

  That white soldier wrapped his left hand around my throat and squeezed.

  “You get to breathe,” said the soldier. “Or you get to ask questions. You make the choice.”

  “Release that boy,” said another white soldier.

  That white soldier gave my throat one last squeeze and dropped me to the floor. I coughed and gagged.

  The bus was quiet. I lay on the floor and heard the hum-hum-hum of the bus wheels. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands flat against the floor. As the bus traveled, I could feel every pebble and irregularity in the road.

  We traveled for twenty-two miles. I lay on the floor and counted each mile, counted each and every part of a mile, until the bus pulled into the small town of Wright. From my place on the floor, I could hear the loud murmurs of a gathered crowd. I climbed into my seat and looked out the window. Other soldiers were marching in neat rows beside the bus. The citizens of Wright were lined up on both sides of the road. I could see the smiles on some of their white faces. Others were clapping and singing. A few waved as the bus passed them by. One or two were laughing. Fathers lifted sons onto shoulders for a better view. Mothers kneeled next to daughters and made justifications. White teenagers stood on the hoods of cars. Some silently pumped their fists into the sky in celebration, while others screamed unintelligibly and threw obscene gestures at us.