Reservation Blues

by Sherman Alexie

  “Well,” she said, “I should get going. The band is coming home tonight. I need to clean up the house.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you next Sunday, right?”

  “Yeah, and maybe my sister, too.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  Checkers looked at Father Arnold. He smiled. She kissed him quickly on the cheek and ran away. Father Arnold watched her run, touched his cheek, and smiled.

  Father Arnold fell to the couch in his study, exhausted because of the insomnia he suffered the night before services. On the couch, he closed his eyes and dreamed. In his dream, he stood in front of a huge congregation of Indians. He had come to save them all, his collar starched and bleached so white that it blinded, and was so powerful that he had a red phone at the altar that was a direct line to God.

  Listen to me, Father Arnold said, but the Indians ignored him. They talked among themselves, laughed at secret jokes. Some even prayed in their own languages, in their own ways. Eagle feathers raised to the ceiling, pipes smoked, sweetgrass and sage burned.

  Please, Father Arnold said, but the Indians continued to ignore him. He preached for hours without effect. He eventually tired and sat in a pew beside an old Indian woman. Suddenly, the church doors opened, and the local missionaries, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, walked in with black boxes in their arms.

  The Indians were silent.

  The Whitmans walked to the front of the church, bowed to Father Arnold, then turned to the congregation.

  Children, the Whitmans said, you shall listen to Father and believe.

  Each placed a hand on a black box, and the Indians sat at attention.

  You may continue with your sermon, the Whitmans said to Father Arnold.

  Father Arnold hesitated, then stood and preached. The Indians’ emotions swayed with his words. Whenever an Indian’s mind wandered, Marcus and Narcissa threatened to open the black boxes, and the rebellious calmed.

  Father Arnold loved his newfound power, although it was the Protestant missionaries who were responsible for it. He delivered the best sermon ever, and he heard God’s cash register ring as it added up all the Indian souls saved. But those black boxes distracted Father Arnold. They kept the Indians quiet, but he wondered why. He was curious about them and jealous of the Whitmans’ secret power over the Indians.

  Amen.

  After the sermon ended, the Indians left quietly and respectfully. Father Arnold turned to the Whitmans.

  What’s in those black boxes?

  Faith.

  Show me.

  The Whitmans opened the boxes. Father Arnold expected to see jewels, locks of hair, talismans, but discovered nothing.

  They’re empty.

  Of course.

  What do you mean?

  We told the Indians the boxes contained smallpox, and if we opened them, the disease would kill them.

  Why would you do something like that?

  It’s the only way to get them to listen. And you saw how well it works. They listened to you.

  But it’s wrong. We should teach through love.

  Don’t be such a child. Religion is about fear. Fear is just another word for faith, for God.

  Father Arnold looked at the empty black boxes. In his dream, he stared at them for days, until the boxes closed tight.

  Wait, Father Arnold said and noticed the Whitmans were gone, replaced by two Indian women who held the boxes.

  These are for you, the Indian women said.

  What’s in them?

  We don’t know.

  With a thousand dollars in prize money, Coyote Springs made the trek from Seattle back to the Spokane Indian Reservation. Thomas drove from Seattle to Moses Lake, and Chess drove the rest of the way. Junior and Victor slept the whole time. Betty and Veronica, the new white women backup singers, slept beside Junior and Victor.

  “So,” Chess asked Thomas as the blue van crossed the reservation border, “are you coming to church Sunday?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been a long time,” Thomas said.

  “What’s that Father Arnold like?”

  “He seems pretty nice. He’s always hanging around the Trading Post and stuff.”

  Thomas looked at Chess, looked at the pine trees outside the car window. He looked at the highway, at the deer continually threatening to cross in front of the van.

  “Checkers probably has a crush on him by now,” Chess said.

  “On who?” Thomas asked.

  “On Father Arnold.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She always does that. She had a crush on the guy who delivered our mail back home. She stays away from young guys but always gets crushes on older guys, you know?”

  They drove for a while in silence.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Chess said.

  “Which question?” Thomas asked.

  “Will you go to church with me Sunday?”

  Thomas closed his eyes, searched for the answer, and opened them again.

  “How can you go to a church that killed so many Indians?” Thomas asked.

  “The church does have a lot to atone for,” Chess said.

  “When’s that going to happen.”

  “At the tipi flap to heaven, I guess.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait that long. Besides, how do we know they’re going to pay for it? Maybe we got it all backwards and you get into heaven because of hate.”

  “You have to have faith.”

  “But what about Hitler and Ted Bundy? How do you explain George Bush and George Custer? If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?”

  “Sometimes the devil is easier to believe in, enit?”

  “Really. How do you explain all of that? How do you explain all of the murdered Indians?”

  The van rolled on.

  “How do you explain Gandhi and Mother Theresa?” Chess asked. “How do you explain Crazy Horse and Martin Luther King? There’s good and bad in the world. We all get to make the choice. That’s one of the mysteries of faith.”

  “Now you sound like Agatha Christie,” Thomas said.

  “Yeah, and it was God whodunnit.”

  “Who done what?”

  “God created all of this. I mean, how can you look at all of this, all this life, and not believe in God? Look at this reservation. It’s so pretty. Do you think the river and the trees are mistakes? Do you think everything is accidental?”

  “No,” Thomas said, looked at his hands, at the reservation as it rushed by. He loved so much. He loved the way a honey bee circled a flower. Simple stuff, to be sure, but what magic. A flower impressed Thomas more than something like the Grand Coulee Dam. Once he’d stood on the dam for hours and stared at a nest some bird built atop an archway. Thomas looked into himself. He knew his stories came from beyond his body and mind, beyond his tiny soul.

  Thomas closed his eyes and told Chess this story: “We were both at Wounded Knee when the Ghost Dancers were slaughtered. We were slaughtered at Wounded Knee. I know there were whole different tribes there, no Spokanes or Flatheads, but we were still somehow there. There was a part of every Indian bleeding in the snow. All those soldiers killed us in the name of God, enit? They shouted ‘Jesus Christ’ as they ran swords through our bellies. Can you feel the pain still, late at night, when you’re trying to sleep, when you’re praying to a God whose name was used to justify the slaughter?

  “I can see you running like a shadow, just outside the body of an Indian woman who looks like you, until she was shot by an eighteen-year-old white kid from Missouri. He jumps off the horse, falls on her and you, the Indian, the shadow. He cuts and tears with his sword, his hands, his teeth. He ate you both up like he was a coyote. They all ate us like we were mice, rabbits, flightless birds. They ate us whole.”

  Thomas opened his eyes and saw Chess was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t you understand that God didn’t kill any of us?” Chess asked. “Jesus didn
’t kill any of us.”

  “But they allowed it to happen, enit?”

  “They didn’t allow it to happen. It just happened. Those soldiers made the choice. The government made the choice. That’s free will, Thomas. We all get to make the choice. But that don’t mean we all choose good.”

  “But there’s so much evil in the world.”

  “That’s why we have to believe in the good. Not every white person wants to kill Indians. You know most any white who joins up with Indians never wants to leave. It’s always been that way. Everybody wants to be an Indian.”

  “That’s true,” a voice whispered from the back of the van.

  “Who’s that?” Thomas and Chess asked.

  “It’s me, Betty.”

  “What’s true?” Chess asked, irritated at the interruption.

  “White people want to be Indians. You all have things we don’t have. You live at peace with the earth. You are so wise.”

  “You’ve never met Lester FallsApart, have you?” Chess asked. “You’ve never spent a few hours in the Powwow Tavern. I’ll show you wise and peaceful.”

  “I’m sorry I said anything,” Betty said and remained quiet. The other white woman, Veronica, took Betty’s hand, squeezed it, and sent a question along her skin: What are we doing? Victor and Junior snored away.

  “Like I was saying, everybody wants to be an Indian. But not everybody is an Indian. It’s an exclusive club. I certainly couldn’t be Irish. Why do all these white people think they can be Indian all of a sudden?”

  Thomas smiled.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve always had a theory that you ain’t really Indian unless, at some point in your life, you didn’t want to be Indian.”

  “Good theory,” Chess said. “I’m the one who told you that.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  The blue van crossed the Wellpinit city limit.

  “Thomas,” Chess said, “you know there ain’t no such thing as an Indian atheist. And besides, how do you think Indians survived all the shit if there wasn’t a God who loved us? Why do you think you and me are together?”

  “Because of love.”

  “That’s what faith is. Love.”

  Thomas was nervous, sweating. He closed his eyes, searched for another one of his stories, but came back to Chess’s words instead. He listened to her story.

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “I’ll go to church with you. But I ain’t promising nothing.”

  “Hey,” Chess said, “don’t make me any promises. I’m an Indian. I haven’t heard many promises I believed anyway.”

  The blue van pulled into Thomas’s driveway. Checkers stood in a window. All the house lights blazed brightly in the reservation night. Junior and Victor rolled over in their sleep, only momentarily bothered by the lights and noise, while Betty and Veronica pretended to sleep. Chess jumped out of the van and ran for her sister. Thomas watched Chess and Checkers hug in his front yard. Then he closed his eyes and left them alone.

  6

  Falling Down and Falling Apart

  I KNOW A WOMAN, Indian in her bones

  Who spends the powwow dancing all alone

  She can be lonely, sometimes she can cry

  And drop her sadness into the bread she fries

  I know a woman, Indian in her eyes

  Full-blood in her heart, full-blood when she cries

  She can be afraid, sometimes she can shake

  But her medicine will never let her break

  chorus:

  But she don’t want a warrior and she don’t want no brave

  And she don’t want a renegade heading for an early grave

  She don’t need no stolen horse, she don’t need no stolen heart

  She don’t need no Indian man falling down and falling apart

  I know a woman, Indian in her hands

  Wanting me to sing, wanting me to dance

  She’s out there waiting, no matter the weather

  I’d walk through lightning just to give her a feather

  (repeat chorus)

  Robert Johnson sat in a rocking chair on Big Mom’s front porch. Big Mom’s rocking chair. He had no idea where she had gone. Big Mom was always walking away without warning.

  “Robert,” Big Mom had said upon his arrival at her house, “you’re safe here. Ain’t nobody can take you away from this house.”

  But Johnson was still not comfortable in his safety. He dreamed of that guitar he had left in Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s blue van. He couldn’t decide if he had left it there on purpose. Certainly, he had tried to leave it behind before, on trains, in diners, on the roadside. He buried that guitar, he threw it in rivers, dropped it off tall buildings. But it always came back to him.

  Sometimes, the guitar took weeks to find him. Those were glorious days. Johnson was free to wander and talk to anybody he wished. He never searched for the Gentleman’s eyes hidden behind a stranger’s face. The Gentleman was just a ghost, just a small animal dashing across the road. When that guitar was gone, Johnson had even considered falling in love. But the guitar would eventually find him. It always found him.

  Johnson had to work the minimum jobs, washing dishes, sweeping floors, delivering pizzas, because he could never play music for money. Never again. And just when he began to allow himself hope, he would come home from his latest job to find that guitar, all shiny and new, on the bed in his cheap downtown apartment. Johnson had wept every time. He had considered burying himself, throwing himself into the river, jumping off a tall building. That guitar made him crazy. But he didn’t know what would be waiting on the other side. What if he woke up on the other side with that guitar wrapped in his arms? What if it weighed him down like an anchor as he sank to the bottom, a single chord echoing in his head over and over again?

  That guitar would never let Johnson go, until he left it in Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s blue van. Johnson felt free and guilty at the same time. The guitar would never let go of those Indians now. It held onto Victor even harder than it ever held Johnson.

  Robert Johnson rocked in Big Mom’s chair and studied his hands, scarred and misshapen. All the wounds had healed, but he could still feel the itching deep down. The itch that can never be scratched. Sometimes he missed the guitar. Johnson closed his eyes against the tears and opened his mouth to sing:

  Mmmmm mmmm

  I’s up this mornin’

  Ah, blues walkin’ like a man

  I’s up this mornin’

  Ah, blues walkin’ like a man

  Worried blues

  Give me your right hand

  Then the music stopped. The reservation exhaled. Those blues created memories for the Spokanes, but they refused to claim them. Those blues lit up a new road, but the Spokanes pulled out their old maps. Those blues churned up generations of anger and pain: car wrecks, suicides, murders. Those blues were ancient, aboriginal, indigenous.

  In his bed, Thomas Builds-the-Fire had recognized Robert Johnson’s voice as those blues drifted down from Big Mom’s mountain. But Thomas also heard something hidden behind the words. He heard Robert Johnson’s grandmother singing backup. Thomas closed his eyes and saw that grandmother in some tattered cabin. No windows, blanket for a door, acrid smoke. Johnson’s grandmother was not alone in that cabin. Other black men, women, and children sang with her. The smell of sweat, blood, and cotton filled the room. Cotton, cotton. Those black people sang for their God; they sang with joy and sorrow. The white men in their big houses heard those songs and smiled. Those niggers sing-in’ and dancin’ again, those white men thought. Damn music don’t make sense.

  Thomas listened closely, but the other Spokanes slowly stretched their arms and legs, walked outside, and would not speak about any of it. They buried all of their pain and anger deep inside, and it festered, then blossomed, and the bloom grew quickly.

  From The Wellpinit Rawhide Press:

  Open Letter to the Spokane Tribe

  Dear Tribal Members,

  As you
all know, Coyote Springs, our local rock band, has just returned from Seattle with two white women. They are named Betty and Veronica, of all things. I’m beginning to seriously wonder about Coyote Springs’s ability to represent the Spokane Tribe.

  First of all, they are drunks. Victor and Junior are such drunks that even Lester FallsApart thinks they drink too much. Second, the two Indian women in the band are not Spokanes. They are Flathead. I’ve always liked our Flathead cousins, but Coyote Springs is supposedly a Spokane Indian band. We don’t even have to talk about the problems caused by the white women.

  I know the band was great when it started. I even went to a couple of their practices in Irene’s Grocery, but things have gotten out of hand. We have to remember that Coyote Springs travels to a lot of places as a representative of the Spokane Tribe. Do we really want other people to think we are like this band? Do we really want people to think that the Spokanes are a crazy storyteller, a couple of irresponsible drunks, a pair of Flathead Indians, and two white women? I don’t think so.

  Rumor has it that Checkers Warm Water has quit the band and joined the Catholic Church Choir. We can only hope the rest of the band follows her. They could all use God.

  Sincerely,

  David WalksAlong

  Spokane Tribal Council Chairman

  Nervous and frightened, Thomas walked with Chess and Checkers to church early Sunday morning. He wondered if the Catholics had installed a faith detector at the door, like one of those metal detectors in an airport. The alarms would ring when he walked through the church doors.

  “Thanks for coming,” Chess said.

  Thomas smiled but said nothing and fought the urge to run away.

  “Yeah,” Checkers said. “This will be great.”

  When the trio came within sight of the Catholic Church, Thomas was suddenly angry. He remembered how all those Indians bowed down to a little white man in Rome.

  “Chess,” Thomas said, “no matter what, I ain’t ever going to listen to that Pope character.”

  “Why should you? I don’t.”

  Father Arnold greeted Thomas, Chess, and Checkers at the door. He shook their hands, touched their shoulders, made eye contact that felt like a spiritual strip search.