Ten Little Indians: Stories

by Sherman Alexie

  Suddenly, Sharon and I were forty. For my birthday that year, she and the kids all pitched in together and gave me a T-shirt that read LOST CAT on the front and DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM? on the back.

  I laughed and wore that shirt as pajamas. For two years, Sharon fell asleep next to me wearing that shirt.

  “Oh, Lord,” I said to Sharon on the day I finally tossed the ragged T-shirt into the trash. “With every new day comes a new monument to our love and pain.”

  “Who wrote that?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “It’s free verse,” she said. “I hate free verse.”

  We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread, our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library. Whitman in the pantry! The Brontë sisters in the television room! Hardy on the front porch! Dickinson in the laundry room! We kept a battered copy of Native Son in the downstairs bathroom so our guests would have something valuable to read!

  How do you measure a marriage? Three of our children still lived in Seattle and taught high school English, history, and Spanish respectively, while the fourth managed a homeless shelter in Portland, Oregon. Maybe Sharon and I had never loved each other well enough, but our kids were smart and talented and sober. They made less money than we did, as we made less than our parents did. We were going the wrong way on the social-class map! How glorious!

  Every Sunday night, we all gathered for dinner (Joshua drove up from Portland with his partner, Aaron, and their son) and told one another the best stories of our weeks. We needed those small ceremonies. Our contentment was always running only slightly ahead of our dissatisfaction.

  Was it enough? I don’t know. But we knew enough not to ask ourselves too often. We knew to ask ourselves such questions during daylight hours. We fought hard for our happiness, and sometimes we won. Over the years, we won often enough to develop a strong taste for winning.

  And then suddenly and mortally, Sharon and I were sixty-six years old.

  On her birthday that year, surrounded by her husband, daughters, sons, and six grandkids, Sharon blew out the candles on her cake, closed her eyes, and made some secret wish.

  One year later, after chemotherapy, radiation, organic food, acupuncture, and tribal shaman, Sharon lay on her deathbed in Sacred Hope Hospital. Our children had left their children to gather around Sharon, and it was good-bye Rachael! Good-bye Sarah! Good-bye Francis! Good-bye Joshua! She asked our children to give us some privacy. They cried and hugged her and left us alone.

  “I’m going to die soon,” Sharon said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m okay with it.”

  “I’m not. Because I love you so much,” I said, “I would fistfight Time to win back your youth.”

  “You’re a liar,” she said and smiled, too tired to laugh.

  “I lied to you once,” I said. “But I haven’t lied to you since.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  What You Pawn I Will Redeem

  Noon

  ONE DAY YOU HAVE a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.

  I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a one-hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out within two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs for many years, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy. Of course, “crazy” is not the official definition of my mental problem, but I don’t think “asocial disorder” fits it, either, because that makes me sound like I’m a serial killer or something. I’ve never hurt another human being, or at least not physically. I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, at that, because I’ve never abandoned one woman for another. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. And I’ve been disappearing ever since. But I’m not going to tell you any more about my brain or my soul.

  I’ve been homeless for six years. If there’s such a thing as being an effective homeless man, I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use their bathrooms. I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden in the back of the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of, but it means a lot to me, being truthworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.

  Probably none of this interests you. I probably don’t interest you much. Homeless Indians are everywhere in Seattle. We’re common and boring, and you walk right on by us, with maybe a look of anger or disgust or even sadness at the terrible fate of the noble savage. But we have dreams and families. I’m friends with a homeless Plains Indian man whose son is the editor of a big-time newspaper back east. That’s his story, but we Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmakers, so maybe that Plains Indian hobo is a plain old everyday Indian. I’m kind of suspicious of him, because he describes himself only as Plains Indian, a generic term, and not by a specific tribe. When I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me exactly what he is, he said, “Do any of us know exactly what we are?” Yeah, great, a philosophizing Indian. “Hey,” I said, “you got to have a home to be that homely.” He laughed and flipped me the eagle and walked away. But you probably want to know more about the story I’m really trying to tell you.

  I wander the streets with a regular crew, my teammates, my defenders, and my posse. It’s Rose of Sharon, Junior, and me. We matter to one another if we don’t matter to anybody else. Rose of Sharon is a big woman, about seven feet tall if you’re measuring overall effect, and about five feet tall if you’re talking about the physical. She’s a Yakama Indian of the Wishram variety. Junior is a Colville, but there are about 199 tribes that make up the Colville, so he could be anything. He’s good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement. He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting around them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian, and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian. I am living proof of the horrible damage that colonialism has done to us Skins. But I’m not going to let you know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways. I’m a strong man, and I know that silence is the best way of dealing with white folks.

  This whole story started at lunchtime, when Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I were panning the handle down at Pike Place Market. After about two hours of negotiating, we earned five dollars, good enough for a bottle of fortified courage from the most beautiful 7-Eleven in the world. So we headed over that way, feeling like warrior drunks, and we walked past this pawnshop I’d never noticed before. And that was strange, because we Indians have built-in pawnshop radar. But the strangest thing was the old powwow-dance regalia I saw hanging in the window.

  “That’s my grandmother’s regalia,” I said to Rose of Sharon and Junior.

  “How do you know for sure?” Junior asked.

  I didn’t know for sure, because I hadn’t seen that regalia in person ever. I’d seen only photographs of my grandmother dancing in it. And that was bef
ore somebody stole it from her fifty years ago. But it sure looked like my memory of it, and it had all the same colors of feathers and beads that my family always sewed into their powwow regalia.

  “There’s only one way to know for sure,” I said.

  So Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked into the pawnshop and greeted the old white man working behind the counter.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “That’s my grandmother’s powwow regalia in your window,” I said. “Somebody stole it from her fifty years ago, and my family has been looking for it ever since.”

  The pawnbroker looked at me like I was a liar. I understood. Pawnshops are filled with liars.

  “I’m not lying,” I said. “Ask my friends here. They’ll tell you.”

  “He’s the most honest Indian I know,” Rose of Sharon said.

  “All right, honest Indian,” the pawnbroker said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Can you prove it’s your grandmother’s regalia?”

  Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on their regalia. But we always hid it where you had to search hard to find it.

  “If it really is my grandmother’s,” I said, “there will be one yellow bead hidden somewhere on it.”

  “All right, then,” the pawnbroker said. “Let’s take a look.”

  He pulled the regalia out of the window, laid it down on his glass counter, and we searched for that yellow bead and found it hidden beneath the armpit.

  “There it is,” the pawnbroker said. He didn’t sound surprised. “You were right. This is your grandmother’s regalia.”

  “It’s been missing for fifty years,” Junior said.

  “Hey, Junior,” I said. “It’s my family’s story. Let me tell it.”

  “All right,” he said. “I apologize. You go ahead.”

  “It’s been missing for fifty years,” I said.

  “That’s his family’s sad story,” Rose of Sharon said. “Are you going to give it back to him?”

  “That would be the right thing to do,” the pawnbroker said. “But I can’t afford to do the right thing. I paid a thousand dollars for this. I can’t give away a thousand dollars.”

  “We could go to the cops and tell them it was stolen,” Rose of Sharon said.

  “Hey,” I said to her, “don’t go threatening people.”

  The pawnbroker sighed. He was thinking hard about the possibilities.

  “Well, I suppose you could go to the cops,” he said. “But I don’t think they’d believe a word you said.”

  He sounded sad about that. Like he was sorry for taking advantage of our disadvantages.

  “What’s your name?” the pawnbroker asked me.

  “Jackson,” I said.

  “Is that first or last?” he asked.

  “Both.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, it’s true. My mother and father named me Jackson Jackson. My family nickname is Jackson Squared. My family is funny.”

  “All right, Jackson Jackson,” the pawnbroker said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a thousand dollars, would you?”

  “We’ve got five dollars total,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” he said and thought hard about the possibilities. “I’d sell it to you for a thousand dollars if you had it. Heck, to make it fair, I’d sell it to you for nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I’d lose a dollar. It would be the moral thing to do in this case. To lose a dollar would be the right thing.”

  “We’ve got five dollars total,” I said again.

  “That’s too bad,” he said again and thought harder about the possibilities. “How about this? I’ll give you twenty-four hours to come up with nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You come back here at lunchtime tomorrow with the money, and I’ll sell it back to you. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds good,” I said.

  “All right, then,” he said. “We have a deal. And I’ll get you started. Here’s twenty bucks to get you started.”

  He opened up his wallet and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I walked out into the daylight to search for nine hundred and seventy-four more dollars.

  1:00 P.M.

  Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7-Eleven and spent it to buy three bottles of imagination. We needed to figure out how to raise all that money in one day. Thinking hard, we huddled in an alley beneath the Alaska Way Viaduct and finished off those bottles one, two, and three.

  2:00 P.M.

  Rose of Sharon was gone when I woke. I heard later she had hitchhiked back to Toppenish and was living with her sister on the reservation.

  Junior was passed out beside me, covered in his own vomit, or maybe somebody else’s vomit, and my head hurt from thinking, so I left him alone and walked down to the water. I loved the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.

  When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen north ever since.

  These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back.

  “How long has your boat been gone?” I asked.

  “Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said.

  I cried with them for a while.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?”

  They didn’t.

  3:00 P.M.

  I walked back to Junior. He was still passed out. I put my face down near his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was alive, so I dug around in his blue-jean pockets and found half a cigarette. I smoked it all the way down and thought about my grandmother.

  Her name was Agnes, and she died of breast cancer when I was fourteen. My father thought Agnes caught her tumors from the uranium mine on the reservation. But my mother said the disease started when Agnes was walking back from the powwow one night and got run over by a motorcycle. She broke three ribs, and my mother said those ribs never healed right, and tumors always take over when you don’t heal right.

  Sitting beside Junior, smelling the smoke and salt and vomit, I wondered if my grandmother’s cancer had started when somebody stole her powwow regalia. Maybe the cancer started in her broken heart and then leaked out into her breasts. I know it’s crazy, but I wondered if I could bring my grandmother back to life if I bought back her regalia.

  I needed money, big money, so I left Junior and walked over to the Real Change office.

  4:00 P.M.

  “Real Change is a multifaceted organization that publishes a newspaper, supports cultural projects that empower the poor and homeless, and mobilizes the public around poverty issues. Real Change’s mission is to organize, educate, and build alliances to create solutions to homelessness and poverty. They exist to provide a voice to poor people in our community.”

  I memorized Real Change’s mission statement because I sometimes sell the newspaper on the streets. But you have to stay sober to sell it, and I’m not always good at staying sober. Anybody can sell the newspaper. You buy each copy for thirty cents and sell it for a dollar and keep the net profit.

  “I need one thousand four hundred and thirty papers,” I said to the Big Boss.

  “That’s a strange number,” he said. “And that’s a lot of papers.”

  “I need them.”

  The Big Boss pulled out the calculator and did the math. “It will cost you four hundred and twenty-nine d
ollars for that many,” he said.

  “If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t need to sell the papers.”

  “What’s going on, Jackson-to-the-Second-Power?” he asked. He is the only one who calls me that. He is a funny and kind man.

  I told him about my grandmother’s powwow regalia and how much money I needed to buy it back.

  “We should call the police,” he said.

  “I don’t want to do that,” I said. “It’s a quest now. I need to win it back by myself.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And to be honest, I’d give you the papers to sell if I thought it would work. But the record for most papers sold in a day by one vendor is only three hundred and two.”

  “That would net me about two hundred bucks,” I said.

  The Big Boss used his calculator. “Two hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents,” he said.

  “That’s not enough,” I said.