Reservation Blues

by Sherman Alexie

  “Who is that?” Chess and Checkers asked as Coyote Springs crested a rise and saw a huge woman standing in the doorway of a blue house.

  “That’s Big Mom,” Thomas said.

  Big Mom was over six feet tall and had braids that hung down past her knees. Her braids themselves were taller than any of the members of Coyote Springs and probably weighed more, too. She had a grandmother face, lined and crossed with deep wrinkles. But her eyes were young, so young that the rest of her face almost looked like a mask. Big Mom filled up the doorway of that blue house. She wasn’t obese at all, just thick and heavy.

  “Ya-hey,” Big Mom called out to them, and her voice shook the ground.

  “Did we take some bad acid?” Victor asked Junior.

  “I hope so,” Junior said.

  Big Mom walked across her yard to greet the band. She wore a full-length beaded buckskin outfit.

  “You’re the lead singer,” Big Mom said, “Thomas Builds-the-Fire.”

  “Yes, I am,” Thomas said. “Where’s Robert Johnson?”

  “He’s away in the trees, looking for some good wood. He’s going to build himself a new guitar.”

  “What about his old guitar?” Thomas asked.

  “That guitar is Victor’s responsibility now,” Big Mom said. “I just wanted to see it. I just wanted Victor to know he gets to make choices. He can play the guitar or not. I don’t think he should, but I won’t take it away. If you want, I can throw it away, Victor.”

  “Shit,” Victor said. “I’d like to see you try and take this guitar away.”

  That guitar nuzzled Victor’s neck. Big Mom watched it carefully.

  “And you’re all going to play for some record company?” Big Mom asked.

  “Yeah, we are. How did you know that anyway?”

  “Ancient Indian magic.”

  “Shit,” Victor said. “Everybody on the reservation knows about it by now. Ain’t no magic in that.”

  “Well,” Big Mom said, “I guess you’re right. But gossip can be a form of magic. Enit, Victor?”

  “I don’t believe in magic.”

  “Victor,” Big Mom said, “you should forgive that priest who hurt you when you were little. That will give you power over him, you know? Forgiveness is magic, too.”

  “What are you talking about?” Victor asked, but he knew. He still felt the priest’s hands on his body after all those years.

  “That poor man hasn’t even forgiven himself yet,” Big Mom said. “He’s in an old-age home in California. He just cries all day long.”

  Victor couldn’t talk. He was frozen with the thought of that priest’s life. He had prayed for his death for years, had even wanted to kill him, but never once considered forgiveness.

  “And you’re Junior Polatkin,” Big Mom said.

  “Yeah, I am,” Junior said. “And I’m scared.”

  Big Mom reared her head back and laughed a thunderstorm. Junior nearly pissed a rain shower in his shorts.

  “Don’t be scared, Junior,” Big Mom said and held out two huge drumsticks. “These are for you.”

  “I can’t use those, I don’t think I can even lift them.”

  “Take them. They’re yours.”

  Junior reached for the sticks, hesitated, then grabbed them quickly. They were too heavy at first, and they dropped to the ground. But Junior reached down and pulled them up. Then he smiled and pounded a little rhythm across the ground.

  “Beautiful,” Big Mom said.

  “Shit,” Victor said. “She thinks she’s a medicine woman. She thinks she’s Yoda and Junior is Luke Skywalker. Use the force, Junior, use the force.”

  Big Mom ignored Victor.

  “And you two are the sisters, Eunice and Gladys Warm Water,” Big Mom said. “You’re special women. Come sweat with me.”

  “Eunice and Gladys?” Junior, Victor, and Thomas asked.

  Chess and Checkers ducked their heads, hid their faces.

  “Eunice and Gladys?” Victor said again. “Jeez, your parents must’ve been seduced by the dark side of the force when they named you, enit?”

  “Eunice?” Thomas asked Chess.

  “Yeah, I’m Eunice,” Chess whispered.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” Big Mom said. Chess and Checkers each took a hand, and Big Mom led them to the sweatlodge, leaving the men of Coyote Springs to their fears and drumsticks.

  From Checkers (Gladys) Warm Water’s journal:

  I was so scared when I first saw Big Mom. She was this huge woman with fingers as big as my arms, I think. I kept thinking she could squash me like a bug. But then she called me a special woman. It made me realize Big Mom is really a woman and we could have a good talk.

  She took Chess and me into the sweatlodge, and I kept thinking that Big Mom was inside my head. I’ve always been able to sort of read people’s minds, been able to get into their heads a little bit. Even Chess always told me I had a little bit of magic. But there were always people, especially women, who had more magic. I remember I was trying to read this old white lady’s mind on a bus ride to Missoula when she turned to me and said “Get out!” Well, she really said it in her head. That old white lady threw me out of her mind, and I had a headache for a week. But that was nothing compared to Big Mom. I kept feeling like she could have made commodity applesauce out of my brain.

  Anyway, we took a sweat together, and it was great. Big Mom sang better than anybody I ever heard, even Aretha Franklin. That steam in the lodge felt so good in my throat and lungs. It made me feel like I could sing better. Chess said the steam made her feel that way, too. And Thomas said we could sing better after we came out of the sweatlodge with Big Mom.

  But I was also kind of scared that Big Mom would know that I was in love with Father Arnold. She might know that I kissed him and that he kissed me back. I was scared of what she would think of me. How can an Indian woman love any white man like that, and him being a priest besides? Big Mom felt like she came from a whole different part of God than Father Arnold did. Is that possible? Can God be broken into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle? What if it’s like one of those puzzles that Indian kids buy at secondhand stores? You put it together and find out one or two pieces are missing.

  I looked at Big Mom and thought that God must be made up mostly of Indian and woman pieces. Then I looked at Father Arnold and thought that God must be made up of white and man pieces. I don’t know what’s true.

  “I’m hungry,” Victor said as they all lay on the floor in Big Mom’s living room.

  “You’re always hungry,” Chess said.

  “Will you two be quiet, please?” Thomas said. “Big Mom is still sleeping.”

  “Oh,” Victor said, loudly. “I didn’t think God needed to sleep. I thought God was a twenty-four-hour convenience store.”

  “She’s not God,” Thomas said.

  “Oh, my,” Victor said. “The perfect Thomas admitting that Big Mom ain’t God. That’s blasphemy, enit?”

  “It’s not blasphemy,” Thomas said. “There is no god but God.”

  “Well,” Victor asked, “who is she then?”

  The rest of Coyote Springs looked for the answer, too.

  “She’s just a part of God,” Thomas said. “We’re all a part of God, enit? Big Mom is just a bigger part of God.”

  “Literally,” Victor said.

  “She’s going to teach us how to play better,” Thomas said. “She’s going to teach us new chords and stuff.”

  “How?” Victor said. “She’s just some old Indian woman.”

  Just then, Big Mom played the loneliest chord that the band had ever heard. It drifted out of her bedroom, floated across the room, and landed at the feet of Coyote Springs. It crawled up their clothes and into their ears. Junior fainted.

  “What in the hell was that?” Victor asked.

  Big Mom walked out of the bedroom carrying a guitar made of a 1965 Malibu and the blood of a child killed at Wounded Knee in 1890.

  “Listen,” Thomas said. />
  Big Mom hit the chord again with more force, and it knocked everybody to the ground. Everybody except Junior, who was already passed out on the ground.

  “Please,” Chess said, but she didn’t know if she wanted Big Mom to please, quit playing, or please, don’t stop.

  Big Mom hit that chord over and over, until Coyote Springs had memorized its effects on their bodies. Junior had regained consciousness long enough to remember his failures, before the force of the music knocked him out again.

  “Enough!” Victor shouted. “I can’t hear myself think!”

  “There,” Big Mom said to Victor. “Have you learned anything?”

  “I’ve learned that a really big guitar makes a really big noise.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you want me to say? I keep waiting for you to call me Grasshopper and ask me to snatch some goddamn pebble from your hand.”

  Thomas stood up and reached for Big Mom’s guitar.

  “Patience,” Big Mom said and pushed his hand away.

  “I can play that chord,” Thomas said. “But I need your guitar to do it.”

  “All Indians can play that chord,” Big Mom said. “It’s the chord created especially for us. But you have to play it on your own instrument, Thomas. You couldn’t even lift my guitar.”

  “What about Victor?” Thomas asked. “He’s got Robert Johnson’s guitar. Why can’t I have your guitar?”

  “That guitar is different,” Big Mom said. “That guitar wanted Victor.”

  “Shit,” Victor said. “This is all starting to sound like a New Age convention. Where are the fucking crystals? Well, I know who’s got the fucking crystals. Jim Morrison’s got the fucking crystals, and he’s dancing naked around the campfire with a bunch of naked white people, singing and complaining that his head feels just like a toad.”

  “Please don’t say that name,” Big Mom said. “I’m so tired of that name. It’s irritating how much I have to hear that name.

  “What?” Victor asked. “Which name? Jim Morrison?”

  “Stop that,” Big Mom said.

  “Jim Morrison,” Victor said and laughed. “Jim Morrison, Jim Morrison, Jim-fucking-Morrison.”

  Big Mom shook her head, walked out of the house, and left Coyote Springs alone.

  “You’re such an asshole,” Chess said.

  “What’s going on?” Junior asked as he finally woke up.

  “I know I can play that chord,” Thomas said.

  “I kind of like the Doors,” Checkers said.

  “This is the end, my friends, this is the end,” Victor said.

  Victor wasn’t the first Indian man to question Big Mom’s authority. In fact, many of the Indian men who were drawn to Big Mom doubted her abilities. Indian men have started to believe their own publicity and run around acting like the Indians in movies.

  “Michael White Hawk,” Big Mom said to the toughest Spokane Indian man of the late twentieth century. “Don’t you understand that the musical instrument is not to be used in the same way that a bow and arrow is? Music is supposed to heal.”

  “But, Big Ma,” White Hawk said, “I’m a warrior. I’m ’posed to fight.”

  “No, Michael, you’re a saxophone player, and you need to work on your reed technique.”

  Most times, the Indian men learned from Big Mom, but Michael White Hawk never admitted his errors. White Hawk had actually been something of a prodigy, an idiot savant, who could play the horn even though he couldn’t read or write.

  “I hate white men,” White Hawk said. “I smash my sax’-phone on their heads.

  “Michael,” Big Mom said, “you run around playing like you’re a warrior. You’re the first to tell an Indian he’s not being Indian enough. How do you know what that means? You need to take care of your people. Smashing your guitar over the head of a white man is just violence. And the white man has always been better at violence anyway. They’ll always be better than you at violence.”

  “You don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout,” White Hawk said. “You jus’ a woman.”

  He left Big Mom’s house after that and ended up in Walla Walla State Penitentiary for smashing his saxophone over the head of a cashier at a supermarket in Spokane.

  “He tryin’ to cheat me for my carrots,” White Hawk shouted as he was led away to prison.

  “When are Indians ever going to have heroes who don’t hurt people?” Big Mom asked her students. “Why do all of our heroes have to carry guns? All Indian heroes have to be Indian men, too. Why can’t Indian women be heroes?”

  Some of her Indian men students would get all pissed off and leave. They suddenly saw Big Mom as a tiny grandmother without teeth or a life. She shrank in their eyes, until she was just some dried old apple sitting on a windowsill. In their minds, she changed into a witch, bitter and angry.

  I’ll get you, my pretty, Big Mom said in their heads, although it didn’t sound like her at all. And your little dog, too, because you goddamn Indian boys always got some dog following you around.

  And those Indian men would never play their music right again. You can still see them, standing by the drums at powwows, trying to remember how to sing in the Indian way. You don’t remember, do you? asks the strange voice in their heads. Listen to me. I’ll teach you. They attempt to tap their feet in rhythm with the dancers but can never quite get it.

  Follow me, that wild voice said. I’ll give you everything you want. Everything.

  All the guitar players cut their fingers to shreds on guitar strings.

  Let me fix those wounds for you. There, let me suck the infection out. There, that’s good, that’s good.

  “Forgive us, save us,” said those repentant guitar players, with hands bandaged and bloodied, when they crawled back to Big Mom.

  “I ain’t Jesus. I ain’t God,” Big Mom said. “I’m just a music teacher.”

  “But look what you did to us.”

  “I didn’t do anything to you. You caused all this. You made the choices.”

  “What can we do?”

  “You can change your mind.”

  “I want you to play that chord again,” Big Mom said to Victor.

  “I can’t play it anymore,” Victor said. “I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.”

  Coyote Springs had been practicing twelve hours a day for nearly a week. They were exhausted but had improved greatly, despite Victor’s continual challenges of Big Mom’s magic. There wasn’t enough room to rehearse in Big Mom’s house, so she rigged up some outside lights, which attracted mosquitos and moths.

  “Play it again,” Big Mom said.

  “I can’t. My fingers don’t even work that way.”

  Robert Johnson watched from a distance, hidden in the treeline. He held some scrub wood in his hands. It wasn’t strong wood. There was no way he could make a desk or a chair. That wood wasn’t even good enough to make a broomstick. But somehow Johnson believed that his new guitar waited somewhere in that wood. Proud of his discovery, he was still frightened by his old guitar. Victor’s guitar now. Johnson winced when Victor hit the chord.

  “Play it,” Big Mom said.

  “Yeah,” Thomas said. “Play it hard.”

  “Come on, Big Mom, Thomas,” Chess said. “We’re all tired. Why don’t we quit for the day?”

  “We’ll quit when Big Mom says it’s time to quit,” Thomas said. “Sheridan and Wright are coming to get us in a couple days. And we just ain’t good enough yet.”

  “Jeez,” Victor said. “You sound like we’re in some goddamn reservation coming-of-age movie. Who the fuck you think you are? Billy Jack? Who’s writing your dialogue?”

  Big Mom looked at Thomas as Victor tried once again to play the chord she had requested.

  “Will you play that chord again, please?” Big Mom asked again. “Just a few more times, and then we’ll all go to sleep.”

  Victor flipped Thomas off. He needed a drink. He had been up on that goddamn mountain for a week without a drink.
He was starting to see snakes crawling around. There were snakes up there, but Victor saw a few too many. Victor breathed deep, flexed his tired hands, and hit the chord a few more times. The rest of the band joined in, and they ran off a respectable version of a new song.

  Thomas and Chess whispered in their sleeping bag. After everyone else had fallen asleep, they stayed up to talk.

  “I’m scared,” Thomas said.

  “Scared of what?”

  “I’m scared to be good. I’m scared to be bad. This band could make us rock stars. It could kill us.”

  “Shit, Thomas. That would scare anybody.”

  Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: “Coyote Springs opens a show for Aerosmith at Madison Square Garden. We get up on stage and start to play. At first, the crowd chants for Aerosmith, heckles us, but gradually we win them over. By the time our set is over, the crowd is chanting our name. Coyote Springs. Coyote Springs, Coyote Springs. They chant over and over. They keep chanting our name when Aerosmith comes out. They boo Aerosmith until we come back out. For the rest of our lives, all we can hear are our names, chanted over and over, until we are deaf to everything else.”

  Thomas opened his eyes and stared into the dark.

  “Listen, Chess,” Thomas said, “I’ve spent my whole life being ignored. I’m used to it. If people want to hear us now, come to hear us play, come to listen. Just think how many will come if we get famous.”

  Chess was just as scared as Thomas, maybe more so. She was scared of the band, scared of Victor and Junior, and of Thomas, too. All her life, she had been measured by men. Her father, her priest, her lovers, her employers, her God. Men decided where she would go, how she would talk, even what clothes she was supposed to wear. Now they decided how and where she was supposed to sing. Now, even sweet, gentle Thomas covered her with his shadow. Even in his dreams and stories, Thomas covered her. She sang his songs; she played his music. She played for Phil Sheridan and George Wright and hoped for their approval. And Thomas still there with his shadow. Chess didn’t know whether she should run from that shadow or curl up inside it. She wanted to do both.