The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

by Sherman Alexie

  I hold James with one arm and my basketball with the other arm and I hold everything else inside my whole body.

  1969

  I take James to the Indian clinic because he ain’t crying yet and because all he does sometimes is stare and stare and sometimes he’ll wrap his arms around the stray dogs and let them carry him around the yard. He’s strong enough to hold his body off the ground but he ain’t strong enough to lift his tongue from the bottom of his mouth to use the words for love or anger or hunger or good morning. Maybe he’s only a few years old but he’s got eyes that are ancient and old and dark like a castle or a lake where the turtles go to die and sometimes even to live. Maybe he’s going to howl out the words when I least expect it or want it and he’ll yell out a cuss word in church or a prayer in the middle of a grocery store. Today I moved through town and walked and walked past the people who hadn’t seen me in so long maybe for months and they asked questions about me and James and no one bothered to knock on the door and look for the answers. It’s just me and James walking and walking except he’s on my back and his eyes are looking past the people who are looking past us for the coyote of our soul and the wolverine of our heart and the crazy crazy man that touches every Indian who spends too much time alone. I stand in the Trading Post touching the canned goods and hoping for a vision of all the miles until Seymour comes in with a twenty-dollar bill and buys a couple cases of beer and we drink and drink all night long. James gets handed from woman to woman and from man to man and a few children hold this child of mine who doesn’t cry or recognize the human being in his own body. All the drunks happy to see me drunk again and back from the wagon and I fell off that wagon and broke my ass and dreams and I wake up the next morning in a field watching a cow watch me. With piss in my pants I make the long walk home past the HUD houses and abandoned cars and past the powwow grounds and the Assembly of God where the sinless sing like they could forgive us all. I get home and James is there with Suzy Song feeding him and rocking him like a boat or a three-legged chair.

  I say no and I take James away and put him in his crib and I move into Suzy’s arms and let her rock and rock me away from my stomach and thin skin.

  1969

  Long days and nights mean the sky looks the same all the time and James has no words yet but he dreams and kicks in his sleep and sometimes kicks his body against my body as he sleeps in my arms. Nobody dreams all the time because it would hurt too much but James keeps dreaming and sleeping through a summer rainstorm and heat lightning reaching down a hand and then a fist to tear a tree in half and then to tear my eyes in half with the light. We had venison for dinner. We ate deer and its wild taste shook me up and down my spine. James spit his mouthful out on the floor and the dogs came to finish it up and I ate and ate and the dogs ate and ate what they could find and the deer grew in my stomach. The deer grew horns and hooves and skin and eyes that pushed at my rib cage and I ate and ate until I could not feel anything but my stomach expanding and stretched full.

  All my life the days I remember most with every detail sharp and clear are the days when my stomach was full.

  1969

  We played our first basketball game of the season tonight in the community center and I had Suzy Song watch James while I played and all of us warriors roaring against the air and the nets and the clock that didn’t work and our memories and our dreams and the twentieth-century horses we called our legs. We played some Nez Percé team and they ran like they were still running from the cavalry and they were kicking the shit out of us again when I suddenly steal the ball from their half-white point guard and drive all the way to the bucket. I jump in the air planning to dunk it when the half-white point guard runs under me knocking my ass to the floor and when I land I hear a crunch and my leg bends in half the wrong way. They take me to the reservation hospital and later on they tell me my leg has exploded and I can’t play ball for a long time or maybe forever and when Suzy comes by with James and they ask me if this is my wife and son and I tell them yes and James still doesn’t make a noise and so they ask me how old he is. I tell them he’s almost four years old and they say his physical development is slow but that’s normal for an Indian child. Anyhow I have to have an operation and all but since I don’t have the money or the strength or the memory and it’s not covered by Indian Health I just get up and walk home almost crying because my leg and life hurt so bad. Suzy stays with me that night and in the dark she touches my knee and asks me how much it hurts and I tell her it hurts more than I can talk about so she kisses all my scars and she huddles up close to me and she’s warm and she talks into my ear close. She isn’t always asking questions and sometimes she has the answers. In the morning I wake up before her and I hobble into the kitchen and make some coffee and fix a couple of bowls of cornflakes and we sit in bed eating together while James lies still in his crib watching the ceiling so Suzy and I watch the ceiling too.

  The ordinary can be like medicine.

  1970

  Early snow this year and James and I sit at home by the stove because I can’t walk anywhere with my bad knee and since it is snowing so hard outside nobody could drive out to get us but I know somebody must be thinking about us because if they weren’t we’d just disappear just like those Indians who used to climb the pueblos. Those Indians disappeared with food still cooking in the pot and air waiting to be breathed and they turned into birds or dust or the blue of the sky or the yellow of the sun.

  There they were and suddenly they were forgotten for just a second and for just a second nobody thought about them and then they were gone.

  1970

  I took James down to the reservation hospital again because he was almost five years old and still hadn’t bothered to talk yet or crawl or cry or even move when I put him on the floor and once I even dropped him and his head was bleeding and he didn’t make a sound. They looked him over and said there was nothing wrong with him and that he’s just a little slow developing and that’s what the doctors always say and they’ve been saying that about Indians for five hundred years. Jesus I say don’t you know that James wants to dance and to sing and to pound a drum so hard it hurts your ears and he ain’t ever going to drop an eagle feather and he’s always going to be respectful to elders at least the Indian elders and he’s going to change the world. He’s going to dynamite Mount Rushmore or hijack a plane and make it land on the reservation highway. He’s going to be a father and a mother and a son and a daughter and a dog that will pull you from a raging river.

  He’ll make gold out of commodity cheese.

  1970

  Happy birthday James and I’m in the Breakaway Bar drinking too many beers when the Vietnam War comes on television. The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting. All I know about this war is what Seymour told me when he came back from his tour of duty over there and he said all the gooks he killed looked like us and Seymour said every single gook he killed looked exactly like someone he knew on the reservation. Anyhow I go to a Christmas party over at Jana Wind’s house and leave James with my auntie so I could get really drunk and not have to worry about coming home for a few days or maybe for the rest of my life. We all get really drunk and Jana’s old man Ray challenges me to a game of one-on-one since he says I’m for shit now and was never any good anyway but I tell him I can’t since my knee is screwed up and besides there’s two feet of snow on the ground and where are we going to play anyhow? Ray says I’m chickenshit so I tell him come on and we drive over to the high school to the outside court and there’s two feet of snow on the court and we can’t play but Ray smiles and pulls out a bottle of kerosene and pours it all over the court and lights it up and pretty soon the snow is all melted down along with most of Lester FallsApart’s pants since he was standing too close to the court when Ray lit the fire. Anyhow the court is clear and Ray and I go at it and my knee only hurts a little and everyone was cheering us on and I can’t remember who won since I was
too drunk and so was everyone else. Later I hear how Ray and Joseph got arrested for beating some white guy half to death and I say that Ray and Joseph are just kids but Suzy says nobody on the reservation is ever a kid and that we’re all born grown up anyway. I look at James and I think maybe Suzy is wrong about Indian kids being born adults and that maybe James was born this way and wants to stay this way like a baby because he doesn’t want to grow up and see and do everything we all do?

  There are all kinds of wars.

  1971

  So much time alone with a bottle of one kind or another and James and I remember nothing except the last drink and a drunk Indian is like the thinker statue except nobody puts a drunk Indian in a special place in front of a library. For most Indians the only special place in front of a library might be a heating grate or a piece of sun-warmed cement but that’s an old joke and I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive.

  Books and beer are the best and worst defense.

  1971

  Jesse WildShoe died last night and today was the funeral and usually there’s a wake but none of us had the patience or energy to mourn for days so we buried Jesse right away and dug the hole deep because Jesse could fancydance like God had touched his feet. Anyhow we dug the hole all day and since the ground was still a little frozen we kept doing the kerosene trick and melting the ice and frost and when we threw a match into the bottom of the grave it looked like I suppose hell must look and it was scary. There we were ten little Indians making a hell on earth for a fancydancer who already had enough of that shit and probably wouldn’t want to have any more of it and I kept wondering if maybe we should just take his body high up in the mountains and bury him in the snow that never goes away. Maybe we just sort of freeze him so he doesn’t have to feel anything anymore and especially not some crazy ideas of heaven or hell. I don’t know anything about religion and I don’t confess my sins to anybody except the walls and the wood stove and James who forgives everything like a rock. He ain’t talking or crying at all and sometimes I shake him a little too hard or yell at him or leave him in his crib for hours all alone but he never makes a sound. One night I get so drunk I leave him at somebody’s house and forget all about him and can you blame me? The tribal police drag me into the cell for abandonment and I’m asking them who they’re going to arrest for abandoning me but the world is spinning and turning back on itself like a snake eating its own tail. Like a snake my TV dinner rises from the table the next day and snaps at my eyes and wrists and I ask the tribal cop how long I’ve been drunk and he tells me for most of a year and I don’t remember any of it. I’ve got the DT’s so bad and the walls are Nazis making lampshades out of my skin and the toilet is a white man in a white hood riding me down on horseback and the floor is a skinny man who wants to teach me a trick he’s learned to do with a knife and my shoes squeal and kick and pull me down into the dead pig pit of my imagination. Oh Jesus I wake up on the bottom of that mass grave with the bones of generations of slaughter and I crawl and dig my way up through layers and years of the lunch special. I dig for hours through the skin and eyes and the fresh blood soon enough and pull myself through the eye of a sow and pluck the maggots from my hair and I want to scream but I don’t want to open my mouth and taste and taste and taste.

  Like the heroin addict said I just want to be pure.

  1971

  Been in A.A. for a month because that was the only way to keep James with me and my auntie and Suzy Song both moved into the house with me to make sure I don’t drink and to help take care of James. They show the same old movies in A.A. and it’s always the same white guy who almost destroys his life and his wife and his children and his job but finally realizes the alcohol is killing him and he quits overnight and spends the rest of the movie and the rest of his whole life at a picnic with his family and friends and boss all laughing and saying we didn’t even recognize you back then Bob and we’re glad to have you back Daddy and we’ll hire you back at twice the salary you old dog you. Yesterday I get this postcard from Pine Ridge and my cousin says all the Indians there are gone and do I know where they went? I write back and tell him to look in the A.A. meeting and then I ask him if there are more birds with eyes that look like his and I ask him if the sky is more blue and the sun more yellow because those are the colors we all become when we die. I tell him to search his dreams for a man dressed in red with a red tie and red shoes and a hawk head. I tell him that man is fear and will eat you like a sandwich and will eat you like an ice cream cone and will never be full and he’ll come for you in your dreams like he was a bad movie. I tell him to turn his television toward the wall and to study the walls for imperfections and those could be his mother and father and the stain on the ceiling could be his sisters and maybe the warped floorboard squeaking and squeaking is his grandfather talking stories.

  Maybe they’re all hiding on a ship in a bottle.

  1972

  Been sober so long it’s like a dream but I feel better somehow and Auntie was so proud of me she took James and me into the city for James’s checkup and James still wasn’t talking but Auntie and James and I ate a great lunch at Woolworth’s before we headed back to the reservation. I got to drive and Auntie’s uranium money Cadillac is a hell of a car and it was raining a little and hot so there were rainbows rainbows rainbows and the pine trees looked like wise men with wet beards or at least I thought they did. That’s how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I’ll never tell you and I’ll never show you the same trick twice.

  I’m traveling heavy with illusions.

  1972

  Every day I’m trying not to drink and I pray but I don’t know who I’m praying to and if it’s the basketball gathering ash on the shelf or the blank walls crushing me into the house or the television that only picks up public channels. I’ve seen only painters and fishermen and I think they’re both the same kind of men who made a different choice one time in their lives. The fisherman held a rod in his hand and said yes and the painter held a brush in his hand and said yes and sometimes I hold a beer in my hand and say yes. At those moments I want to drink so bad that it aches and I cry which is a strange noise in our house because James refuses tears and he refuses words but sometimes he holds a hand up above his head like he’s reaching for something. Yesterday I nearly trip over Lester FallsApart lying drunk as a skunk in front of the Trading Post and I pick him up and he staggers and trembles and falls back down. Lester I say you got to stand up on your own and I pick him up and he falls down again.

  Only a saint would have tried to pick him up the third time.

  1972

  The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I’m watching it like it could give me vision. James ain’t talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world and held secrets. Like Joy said that everything but humans keeps secrets. Today I get my mail and there’s a light bill and a postcard from an old love from Seattle who asks me if I still love her like I used to and would I come to visit?

  I send her my light bill and tell her I don’t ever want to see her again.

  1973

  James talked today but I had my back turned and I couldn’t be sure it was real. He said potato like any good Indian would because that’s all we eat. But maybe he said I love you because that’s what I wanted him to say or maybe he said geology or mathematics or college basketball. I pick him up and ask him again and again what did you say? He just smiles and I take him to the clini
c and the doctors say it’s about time but are you sure you didn’t imagine his voice? I said James’s voice sounded like a beautiful glass falling off the shelf and landing safely on a thick shag carpet.

  The doctor said I had a very good imagination.

  1973

  I’m shooting hoops again with the younger Indian boys and even some Indian girls who never miss a shot. They call me old man and elder and give me a little bit of respect like not running too fast or hard and even letting me shoot a few more than I should. It’s been a long time since I played but the old feelings and old moves are there in my heart and in my fingers. I see these Indian kids and I know that basketball was invented by an Indian long before that Naismith guy ever thought about it. When I play I don’t feel like drinking so I wish I could play twenty-four hours a day seven days a week and then I wouldn’t wake up shaking and quaking and needing just one more beer before I stop for good. James knows it too and he sits on the sideline clapping when my team scores and clapping when the other team scores too. He’s got a good heart. He always talks whenever I’m not in the room or I’m not looking at him but never when anybody else might hear so they all think I’m crazy. I am crazy. He says things like I can’t believe. He says E = MC2 and that’s why all my cousins drink themselves to death. He says the earth is an oval marble that nobody can win. He says the sky is not blue and the grass is not green.