Ten Little Indians

by Sherman Alexie

  This morning, awake and not awake, William turned down the radio, changing Yvonne Vaughn’s celebratory anthem into whispered blues, and rolled off the couch onto his hands and knees. His back and legs were sore because he’d slept on the living room couch so the alarm wouldn’t disturb his wife and daughter upstairs. Still on his hands and knees, William stretched his spine, using the twelve basic exercises he’d learned from Dr. Adams, that master practitioner of white middle-class chiropractic voodoo. This was all part of William’s regular morning ceremony. Other people find God in ornate ritual, but William called out to Geronimo, Jesus Christ, Saint Therese, Buddha, Allah, Billie Holiday, Simon Ortiz, Abe Lincoln, Bessie Smith, Howard Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joan of Arc and Joan of Collins, John Woo, Wilma Mankiller, and Karl and Groucho Marx while he pumped out fifty push-ups and fifty abdominal crunches. William wasn’t particularly religious; he was generally religious. Finished with his morning calisthenics, William showered in the basement, suffering the water that was always too cold down there, and threaded his long black hair into two tight braids—the indigenous businessman’s tonsorial special—and dressed in his best travel suit, a navy three-button pinstripe he’d ordered online. He’d worried about the fit, but his tailor was a magician and had only mildly chastised William for such an impulsive purchase. After knotting his blue paisley tie, purchased in person and on sale, William walked upstairs in bare feet and kissed his wife, Marie, good-bye.

  “Cancel your flight,” she said. “And come back to bed.”

  “You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said.

  She was a small and dark woman who seemed to be smaller and darker at that time of the morning. Her long black hair had once again defeated its braids, but she didn’t care. She sometimes went two or three days without brushing it. William was obsessive about his mane, tying and retying his ponytail, knotting and reknotting his braids, experimenting with this shampoo and that conditioner. He greased down his cowlicks (inherited from a cowlicked father and grandfather) with shiny pomade, but Marie’s hair was always unkempt, wild, and renegade. William’s hair hung around the fort, but Marie’s rode on the warpath! She constantly pulled stray strands out of her mouth. William loved her for it. During sex, they spent as much time readjusting her hair as they did readjusting positions. Such were the erotic dangers of loving a Spokane Indian woman.

  “Take off your clothes and get in bed,” Marie pleaded now.

  “I can’t do that,” William said. “They’re counting on me.”

  “Oh, the plane will be filled with salesmen. Let some other salesman sell what you’re selling.”

  “Your breath stinks.”

  “So do my feet, my pits, and my butt, but you still love me. Come back to bed, and I’ll make it worth your while.”

  William kissed Marie, reached beneath her pajama top, and squeezed her breasts. He thought about reaching inside her pajama bottoms. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to wrestle him into bed. Oh, God, he wanted to climb into bed and make love. He wanted to fornicate, to sex, to breed, to screw, to make the beast with two backs. Oh, sweetheart, be my little synonym! He wanted her to be both subject and object. Perhaps it was wrong (and unavoidable) to objectify female strangers, but shouldn’t every husband seek to objectify his wife at least once a day? William loved and respected his wife, and delighted in her intelligence, humor, and kindness, but he also loved to watch her lovely ass when she walked, and stare down the front of her loose shirts when she leaned over, and grab her breasts at wildly inappropriate times—during dinner parties and piano recitals and uncontrolled intersections, for instance. He constantly made passes at her, not necessarily expecting to be successful, but to remind her he still desired her and was excited by the thought of her. She was his passive and active.

  “Come on,” she said. “If you stay home, I’ll make you Scooby.”

  He laughed at the inside joke, created one night while he tried to give her sexual directions and was so aroused that he sounded exactly like Scooby-Doo.

  “Stay home, stay home, stay home,” she chanted and wrapped herself tighter around him. He was supporting all of her weight, holding her two feet off the bed.

  “I’m not strong enough to do this,” he said.

  “Baby, baby, I’ll make you strong,” she sang, and it sounded like she was writing a Top 40 hit in the Brill Building, circa 1962. How could he leave a woman who sang like that? He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops! He pulled away from her, dropping her back onto the bed, and stepped away.

  “Willy Loman,” she said, “you must pay attention to me.”

  “I love you,” he said, but she’d already fallen back to sleep—a narcoleptic gift William envied—and he wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to cook and wash dishes.

  William tiptoed into his daughter’s bedroom, expecting to hear her light snore, but she was awake and sitting up in bed, and looked so magical and androgynous with her huge brown eyes and crew-cut hair. She’d wanted to completely shave her head: I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.

  “Daddy,” she said.

  “Grace,” he said. “You should be asleep. You have school today.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I wanted to see you before you left.”

  “Okay,” said William as he kissed her forehead, nose, and chin. “You’ve seen me. Now go back to sleep. I love you and I’m going to miss you.”

  She fiercely hugged him.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’re such a lovely, lovely girl.”

  Preternaturally serious, she took his face in her eyes and studied his eyes. Morally examined by a kindergartner!

  “Daddy,” she said. “Go be silly for those people far away.”

  She cried as William left her room. Already quite sure he was only an adequate husband, he wondered, as he often did, if he was a bad father. During these mornings, he felt generic and violent, like some caveman leaving the fire to hunt animals in the cold and dark. Maybe his hands were smooth and clean, but they felt bloody.

  Downstairs, he put on his socks and shoes and overcoat and listened for his daughter’s crying, but she was quiet, having inherited her mother’s gift for instant sleep. She had probably fallen back into one of her odd little dreams. While he was gone, she often drew pictures of those dreams, coloring the sky green and the grass blue—everything backward and wrong—and had once sketched a man in a suit crashing an airplane into the bright yellow sun. Ah, the rage, fear, and loneliness of a five-year-old, simple and true! She’d been especially afraid since September 11 of the previous year and constantly quizzed William about what he would do if terrorists hijacked his plane.

  “I’d tell them I was your father,” he’d said to her before he left for his last business trip. “And they’d stop being bad.”

  “You’re lying,” she’d said. “I’m not supposed to listen to liars. If you lie to me, I can’t love you.”

  He couldn’t argue with her logic. Maybe she was the most logical person on the planet. Maybe she should be illegally elected president of the United States.

  William understood her fear of flying and of his flight. He was afraid of flying, too, but not of terrorists. After the horrible violence of September 11, he figured hijacking was no longer a useful weapon in the terrorist arsenal. These days, a terrorist armed with a box cutter would be torn to pieces by all of the coach-class passengers and fed to the first-class upgrades. However, no matter how much he tried to laugh his fear away, William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing t
he last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffing around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deodorant, and sarcasm. Still, he understood why people were afraid of him, a brown-skinned man with dark hair and eyes. If Norwegian terrorists had exploded the World Trade Center, then blue-eyed blondes would be viewed with more suspicion. Or so he hoped.

  Locking the front door behind him, William stepped away from his house, carried his garment bag and briefcase onto the front porch, and waited for his taxi to arrive. It was a cold and foggy October morning. William could smell the saltwater of Elliott Bay and the freshwater of Lake Washington. Surrounded by gray water and gray fog and gray skies and gray mountains and a gray sun, he’d lived with his family in Seattle for three years and loved it. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, with any other wife or child, in any other time.

  William was tired and happy and romantic and exaggerating the size of his familial devotion so he could justify his departure, so he could survive his departure. He did sometimes think about other women and other possible lives with them. He wondered how his life would have been different if he’d married a white woman and fathered half-white children who grew up to complain and brag about their biracial identities: Oh, the only box they have for me is Other! I’m not going to check any box! I’m not the Other! I am Tiger Woods! But William most often fantasized about being single and free to travel as often as he wished—maybe two million miles a year—and how much he’d enjoy the benefits of being a platinum frequent flier. Maybe he’d have one-night stands with a long series of traveling saleswomen, all of them thousands of miles away from husbands and children who kept looking up “feminism” in the dictionary. William knew that was yet another sexist thought. In this capitalistic and democratic culture, talented women should also enjoy the freedom to emotionally and physically abandon their families. After all, talented and educated men have been doing it for generations. Let freedom ring!

  Marie had left her job as a corporate accountant to be a full-time mother to Grace. William loved his wife for making the decision, and he tried to do his share of the housework, but he suspected he was an old-fashioned bastard who wanted his wife to stay at home and wait, wait, wait for him.

  Marie was always waiting for William to call, to come home, to leave messages saying he was getting on the plane, getting off the plane, checking in to the hotel, going to sleep, waking up, heading for the meeting, catching an earlier or later flight home. He spent one third of his life trying to sleep in uncomfortable beds and one third of his life trying to stay awake in airports. He traveled with thousands of other capitalistic foot soldiers, mostly men but increasing numbers of women, and stayed in the same Ramadas, Holiday Inns, and Radissons. He ate the same room-service meals and ran the same exercise-room treadmills and watched the same pay-per-view porn and stared out the windows at the same strange and lonely cityscapes. Sure, he was an enrolled member of the Spokane Indian tribe, but he was also a fully recognized member of the notebook-computer tribe and the security-checkpoint tribe and the rental-car tribe and the hotel-shuttle-bus tribe and the cell-phone-roaming-charge tribe.

  William traveled so often, the Seattle-based flight attendants knew him by first name.

  At five minutes to six, the Orange Top taxi pulled into the driveway. The driver, a short and thin black man, stepped out of the cab and waved. William rushed down the stairs and across the pavement. He wanted to get away from the house before he changed his mind about leaving.

  “Is that everything, sir?” asked the taxi driver, his accent a colonial cocktail of American English, formal British, and French sibilants added to a base of what must have been North African.

  “Yes, it is, sir,” said William, self-consciously trying to erase any class differences between them. In Spain the previous summer, an elderly porter had cursed at William when he insisted on carrying his own bags into the hotel. “Perhaps there is something wrong with the caste system, sir,” the hotel concierge had explained to William. “But all of us, we want to do our jobs, and we want to do them well.”

  William didn’t want to insult anybody; he wanted the world to be a fair and decent place. At least that was what he wanted to want. More than anything, he wanted to stay home with his fair and decent family. He supposed he wanted the world to be fairer and more decent to his family. We are special, he thought, though he suspected they were just one more family on this block of neighbors, in this city of neighbors, in this country of neighbors, in a world of neighbors. He looked back at his house, at the windows behind which slept his beloved wife and daughter. When he traveled, he had nightmares about strangers breaking into the house and killing and raping Marie and Grace. In other nightmares, he arrived home in time to save his family by beating the intruders and chasing them away. During longer business trips, William’s nightmares became more violent as the days and nights passed. If he was gone over a week, he dreamed about mutilating the rapists and eating them alive while his wife and daughter cheered for him.

  “Let me take your bags, sir,” said the taxi driver.

  “What?” asked William, momentarily confused.

  “Your bags, sir.”

  William handed him the briefcase but held on to the heavier garment bag. A stupid compromise, thought William, but it’s too late to change it now. God, I’m supposed to be some electric aboriginal warrior, but I’m really a wimpy liberal pacifist. Dear Lord, how much longer should I mourn the death of Jerry Garcia?

  The taxi driver tried to take the garment bag from William.

  “I’ve got this one,” said William, then added, “I’ve got it, sir.”

  The taxi driver hesitated, shrugged, opened the trunk, and set the briefcase inside. William laid the garment bag next to his briefcase. The taxi driver shut the trunk and walked around to open William’s door.

  “No, sir,” said William as he awkwardly stepped in front of the taxi driver, opened the door, and took a seat. “I’ve got it.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the taxi driver and hurried around to the driver’s seat. This strange American was making him uncomfortable, and he wanted to get behind the wheel and drive. Driving comforted him.

  “To the airport, sir?” asked the taxi driver as he started the meter.

  “Yes,” said William. “United Airlines.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  In silence, they drove along Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the bisector of an African American neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying. William and his family were Native American gentry! They were the very first Indian family to ever move into a neighborhood and bring up the property values! That was one of William’s favorite jokes, self-deprecating and politely racist. White folks could laugh at a joke like that and not feel guilty. But how guilty could white people feel in Seattle? Seattle might be the only city in the country where white people lived comfortably on a street named after Martin Luther King, Jr.

  No matter where he lived, William always felt uncomfortable, so he enjoyed other people’s discomfort. These days, in the airports, he loved to watch white people enduring random security checks. It was a perverse thrill, to be sure, but William couldn’t help himself. He knew those white folks wanted to scream and rage: Do I look like a terrorist? And he knew the security officers, most often low-paid brown folks, wanted to scream back: Define terror, you Anglo bastard! William figured he’d been pulled over for pat-down searches about 75 percent of the time. Random, my ass! But that was okay! William might have wanted to irritate other people, but he didn’t want to scare them. He wanted his fellow travelers to know exactly who and what he was: I am a Native American and therefore have ten thousand more reasons to terrorize the U.S. than any of those Taliban jerk-offs, but I have chosen instead to become a civic American citizen, so all of you white folks should be celebrating my kindness and moral decency and awesome ability to forgive! Maybe William should have worn beaded vests when he traveled. Maybe h
e should have brought a hand drum and sang “Way, ya, way, ya, hey.” Maybe he should have thrown casino chips into the crowd.

  The taxi driver turned west on Cherry, drove twenty blocks into downtown, took the entrance ramp onto I-5, and headed south for the airport. The freeway was moderately busy for that time of morning.

  “Where are you going, sir?” asked the taxi driver.

  “I’ve got business in Chicago,” William said. He didn’t really want to talk. He needed to meditate in silence. He needed to put his fear of flying inside an imaginary safe deposit box and lock it away. We all have our ceremonies, thought William, our personal narratives. He’d always needed to meditate in the taxi on the way to the airport. Immediately upon arrival at the departure gate, he’d listen to a tape he’d made of rock stars who died in plane crashes. Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Stevie Ray, “Oh Donna,” “Chantilly Lace,” “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” William figured God would never kill a man who listened to such a morbid collection of music. Too easy a target, and plus, God could never justify killing a planeful of innocents to punish one minor sinner.

  “What do you do, sir?” asked the taxi driver.

  “You know, I’m not sure,” said William and laughed. It was true. He worked for a think tank and sold ideas about how to improve other ideas. Two years ago, his company had made a few hundred thousand dollars by designing and selling the idea of a better shopping cart. The CGI prototype was amazing. It looked like a mobile walk-in closet. But it had yet to be manufactured and probably never would be.

  “You wear a good suit,” said the taxi driver, not sure why William was laughing. “You must be a businessman, no? You must make lots of money.”

  “I do okay.”

  “Your house is big and beautiful.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “You are a family man, yes?”

  “I have a wife and daughter.”