The Toughest Indian in the World

by Sherman Alexie

  She put her head down on the cold table.

  My husband, she said, he was never the best. He was a good man, but he was never a great man.

  With her head down, she breathed deep. With her head down, she fell asleep like somebody had flipped a switch.

  Seymour placed his left hand on her gray hair. He held it there.

  Salmon Boy was jealous. He closed his eyes and sipped at his coffee. It was bitter and instant and when the Indian opened his eyes, he was sitting in the car right at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

  Through the windshield, Salmon Boy watched as Seymour pointed the gun at a tourist family. Mother, father, son, daughter.

  Here, here, said the father, you can have all my money.

  I don’t want your money, said Seymour, I want to know how you met, I want to know how you fell in love.

  But that’s our story, said the father, you can’t steal it.

  Tell me, tell me, shouted Seymour as he grabbed one of the children, the son, and held the empty pistol against his temple.

  Please, please, said the mother, my husband was somebody else’s husband when we met. But I waited for him. I didn’t want to break up his marriage. I never told him I loved him. I just loved him and hoped that was enough. And it was and it was. They divorced and he called me three days later and asked me to marry him. We’d never been on a date, but he asked me to marry him. We’d never done anything but talk in the copy room, but he asked me to marry him. And I knew it was crazy but I married him and we’ve been married for fifteen years.

  How does that happen? Seymour asked. He pushed the son back toward his parents, back toward his sister.

  It happens all the time, said the father, you just never hear about it.

  No, no, no, said Seymour, people don’t love each other anymore. Not anymore like that. Not anymore.

  Seymour turned toward the Grand Canyon, ran toward the void.

  In the car, Salmon Boy held his breath because he was positive that Seymour was going to jump. Salmon Boy’s blood climbed the ladder over his heart. But Seymour stopped just short of the chasm and threw the pistol down, down, down.

  The pistol fell then and is still falling now.

  Oh, said Salmon Boy as Seymour turned to face him.

  How do you love a man? Seymour asked the sky, but the sky didn’t answer.

  Salmon Boy closed his eyes and when he opened them again he was lying in a motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona.

  Seymour quietly slept on the other side of the bed, or perhaps he wasn’t asleep at all.

  Salmon Boy watched the television, watched a black-and-white movie where the people didn’t make any sense.

  Salmon Boy remembered another time, when he was a child, when his father was driving the family back from some powwow or another, when Salmon Boy had picked up the newspaper to discover that the Batman movie was playing on local television. The old-time Batman, the Adam-West-as-Batman Batman.

  Can you drive faster? Salmon Boy asked his father. He wanted to watch the movie.

  We’ll never make it in time, said his father. But he loved his son and so he drove as fast as he could, through the tunnel of his son’s dreams, through a tunnel crowded with all of his son’s dreams.

  They drove by a coyote nailed to a speed-limit sign.

  They drove by a coyote howling from an overpass.

  They drove by a coyote drinking a cup of coffee in a truck-stop diner.

  When they reached the motel, Salmon Boy rushed into the room and switched on the television, expecting to see Batman, but saw only the last few moments of some other movie.

  In that movie, a pretty white boy stares out a window into the falling snow, into a dark courtyard where the snow falls on a man riding a bicycle in circles, into the courtyard where a handsome man rides a bicycle around a statue of a broken heart, or perhaps it wasn’t a broken heart at all, but Salmon Boy remembers it that way.

  He remembers it now as he stares at the black-and-white movie where the characters don’t make any sense, as Seymour sleeps on the other side of the bed, or pretends to be asleep.

  Seymour, said Salmon Boy.

  Yes, said Seymour.

  I am the most lonely I have ever been.

  I know.

  Will you hold me close?

  Yes, yes, I will.

  Salmon Boy pushed himself into Seymour’s arms. They both wore only their boxer shorts. Seymour’s blue shorts contrasted with his pale skin while Salmon Boy’s white boxers glowed in the dark.

  I don’t want to have sex, said Salmon Boy.

  I don’t either.

  But how will we fall in love if we don’t have sex?

  I don’t know.

  They held each other tighter and tighter. They were afraid.

  I am happy in your arms, said Seymour.

  And I am happy in yours.

  Is this what it feels like?

  What?

  To be loved, to be held, to be intimate without the fear of penetration?

  I think so.

  Yes, I think so, too. I think this is what women have wanted from men for all of our lives. I think they want to be held in our arms and fall asleep in the absence of body fluids.

  I think you may be right.

  They held each other tighter and tighter. They were not aroused. They were warm and safe.

  Can we be like this forever? asked Salmon Boy.

  I don’t think that’s possible.

  Together, they watched the black-and-white movie where nothing made sense. They watched it until they fell asleep together and when they woke up they were sitting in a McDonald’s in Tucson, Arizona.

  They wore identical Grand Canyon T-shirts.

  How much money do we have left? asked Seymour.

  Counting the money the old woman gave us?

  Of course.

  Ten dollars.

  That means we’re in some definite financial trouble.

  Appears that way.

  And we’ve just about run out of Arizona, too.

  And almost all of the south this country has.

  And most of the southwest, as well.

  Seymour looked around the McDonald’s. He saw an Indian woman arguing with an Indian man. They spoke in some strange language.

  What’s that they’re talking? asked Seymour.

  Navajo, I think, said Salmon Boy. He’d always believed the Navajo were the most beautiful people on the planet. The man and woman arguing by the window were no exceptions. Their hair and skin were so dark that they looked purple, especially in the white light streaming through the glass.

  Do you know what they’re saying? asked Seymour.

  I don’t speak Navajo.

  But you’re Indian.

  But I’m not Navajo.

  Seymour didn’t like to argue. He stared at the arguing Navajos until they sensed his attention, looked over, and flipped him off.

  Seymour smiled and waved.

  I don’t think that was Navajo, he said. Seymour said, They look like aliens.

  Some people think the Navajos are aliens, said Salmon Boy, like they came down in spaceships ten thousand years ago and took over.

  Seymour kept staring until the Navajo couple gathered up their belongings and left the restaurant. He felt an ache in his heart. He wondered if that coyote was still nailed to the fence post. He wondered what Navajos looked like when they were naked and in love.

  Do you think they love each other? he asked.

  If they do, said Salmon Boy, then it’s alien love. And I don’t know anything about alien love.

  Steven Spielberg knows.

  That’s because he’s an alien, said Salmon Boy. The Jews and the Navajos came down in the same ships, he said. Salmon Boy asked, Didn’t you know that Moses was a Navajo? He asked, Haven’t you heard of the lost tribes?

  Everybody is lost, said Seymour.

  Salmon Boy wondered how much farther they could go on ten dollars. He wondered how much south, how much southwes
t, could fit into the world. He remembered that he’d left the television on when he walked over to the International House of Pancakes. He remembered thinking, I’m just going to be a few minutes. He wondered if the television was still playing, if the woman who lived in the apartment next door was pounding on the wall, screaming at him to turn it down, turn it down, turn it down.

  Salmon Boy wondered why he was homesick for a place where he had lived alone.

  Seymour sipped at his coffee. He remembered the story of a woman who dropped McDonald’s coffee into her lap, burned herself to bits, and won a billion dollars in the lawsuit. He wondered if he should drop coffee into his lap, but then he realized his coffee was only lukewarm. If he dropped it into his lap, he might win fifty bucks for coffee-staining his blue jeans.

  Seymour wondered if the world was a cruel place.

  Are you learning how to love me? asked Seymour.

  Salmon Boy sipped at his own coffee. He didn’t know how to answer that question.

  I took you to the Grand Canyon, said Seymour.

  Seymour said, I have made you promises and I have kept them.

  The silence smelled like smoke.

  It’s a difficult thing, Salmon Boy said after a long time. Salmon Boy whispered, It’s a difficult thing for one man to love another man, whether they kiss each other or not.

  We’ve only kissed once, said Seymour. Maybe we’ll fall in love if we kiss a little more.

  Do you think there’s a number? asked Salmon Boy. Do you think there’s a magic number written on every heart? Do you think you can kiss right up to some magic number and make a person love you?

  Seymour looked around the Tucson McDonald’s. There were white people and Navajos; there were people who preferred their Quarter Pounders with cheese and those who didn’t care for cheese at all; and there were those who desperately wished that McDonald’s would introduce onion rings to its menu.

  Oh, Seymour thought, there are so many possibilities.

  Do you think? he asked. Do you think there’s somebody in here who might love me, who I might love?

  I don’t know, said Salmon Boy, but you are my friend, and I believe in love.

  Salmon Boy remembered the reservation Indian girl who drowned in three feet of water, wrapped up in knots of seaweed, while three other Indian girls tried to pull her free. Salmon Boy believed that the life of that one drowned girl was worth the lives of every person in Arizona.

  Salmon Boy placed his left hand over his heart to protect it.

  How much money do we have? Seymour asked again. He wanted to be sure.

  Ten dollars.

  Then we’re going to need more.

  Yes, yes, we are.

  Seymour leapt to his feet, stood on a table in McDonald’s.

  Excuse me, shouted Seymour, but we are here to take your money, not all of it, but enough to continue, enough to keep moving south.

  Seymour did not have the pistol, but he held his hand in the shape of a pistol. He clung tightly to the idea of a pistol.

  Click, click, click on the empty chambers.

  Seymour wanted to be kind and he wanted to be romantic. He wanted to be the Man Who Saved the Indian. He wanted to be the Coyote Nailed to a Fence Post. He wanted to be the Man Who Could Shoot Thirteen People.

  He was a white man, and therefore he could dream.

  Seymour ordered everybody to lie down on the floor. He ordered them to give up all the money they could spare. Salmon Boy stared down into his coffee cup. In that blackness, he saw the headlights of a fast car.

  Please, please, give us your money, said Seymour. Just a dollar or two, he said.

  The people in McDonald’s gave up their money like an offering. They filled the plate. They moved that much closer to God.

  Hurry, hurry, Seymour shouted. The police are right behind us, they’re right behind us.

  Salmon Boy stared down into his coffee cup and saw a blue man with a gun.

  Oh, said Salmon Boy. He said, Oh, as he rose to his feet and stood on the table beside Seymour. They were men in love with the idea of being in love.

  Please, he said. He said, Please.

  Seymour took all the money his victims could spare, and then he took Salmon Boy’s hand, and they ran outside into all the south and southwest that remained in the world.

  THE SIN EATERS

  I DREAMED ABOUT THE WAR on the night before the war began, and though nobody officially called it a war until years later, I woke that next morning with the sure knowledge that the war, or whatever they wanted to call it, was about to begin and that I would be a soldier in a small shirt.

  On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rainstorm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.

  Those were the days before the first color televisions were smuggled onto the reservation, but after a man with blue eyes had dropped two symmetrical slices of the sun on Japan. All of it happened before a handsome Catholic was assassinated in Dallas, leaving a bright red mark on the tape measure of time, but after the men with blue eyes had carried dark-eyed children into the ovens and made them ash.

  I was a dark-eyed Indian boy who leaned against pine trees and broke them in half. I was twelve years old and strong, with fluid skin that was the same color as Chimacum Creek in April, May, when the mud and water were indistinguishable from each other.

  Those were the days of the old stories, and in many of those stories I was the Indian boy who was capable of anything.

  In one of those stories, I lifted a grown man, Edgar Horse, draped him over my shoulder like an old quilt, and carried him for two miles from the gnarled pine tree in front of the tribal high school all the way down to the trading post in downtown Wellpinit. I carried Edgar, as many others had carried Edgar, because we were living in the days before Indians discovered wheelchairs and the idea of wheelchairs.

  In another of those stories, I was the maker of songs. Widowed grandmothers gave me dollar bills and I invented songs about their long-dead husbands. Often, as I sang, the grandmothers would weep tears that I collected into tin cups and fed to the huckleberry bushes growing on the low hills of the reservation. All these years later, those huckleberries still taste like grief, and a cellar filled with preserved huckleberries is a graveyard stacked high with glass tombstones.

  Because I was the maker of songs, young men gave me small gifts, a blank piece of linen paper, a stick of gum, an envelope decorated with a beautiful, canceled stamp, and in return I taught them love songs. I taught those young men the love songs that transformed scraps of newspaper into thin birds. In the middle of a city, in the middle of a strong wind, a thousand paper birds rattled and sang. I taught those young men the love songs that forced horses to bow their heads and kneel in the fields, the love songs that revealed the secrets of fire, the love songs that healed, the love songs that precipitated wars.

  In another of those stories, in one of many stories about me, about the reservation where I was born, I was the small soldier who lived with his Spokane Indian mother and his Coeur d’Alene Indian father in a two-bedroom house in a valley near the Spokane River.

  I slept alone in one bedroom while my parents shared the second. The living room was small, with just enough space for an end table, console radio, and tattered couch. The kitchen was the largest room in the house. We spent most of our waking hours there at the table that my father had carved from a fallen pine tr
ee. My father had built almost every piece of furniture in the house, but he was not a good carpenter. The chairs rocked though they were not rocking chairs. We had to place one of my father’s old work shirts under one short leg of the dining table to prevent food from sliding into our laps. The radio and all of its bright and mysterious internal organs sat inside a series of homemade wooden boxes that had to be replaced every few months because of small electrical fires.

  When those fires burned, my father would laugh and dance. He would pick up the flames with his bare hands and hold them close to his chest.

  Indians will love anything if given the chance.

  I loved our house. I cried whenever I left it. I never wanted to leave it. I wanted to grow old in that house. I wanted to become the crazy elder who’d lived in the same house for all of his life. When I died there, I wanted to have ninety years of stories hanging in the closets.

  Beside the house, a pine tree bent its back like an old Indian woman walking in a strong wind. A forest of old women marched from horizon to horizon. Two crows, looking for rodents and songbirds, floated in the morning sky. A mile above the crows, clumsy airplanes left behind thick veins of smoke. Miles and miles above the airplanes, seven sibling planets kept track of our secrets.

  On that morning and inside that house, I pulled back the covers of my dream of war and the covers of my bed, and stepped onto the cold, uneven floor. Our house leaned in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. I walked into the kitchen. The wind was blowing from east to west.

  “Mother, there’s going to be a war,” I said to the woman with brown skin and black hair. She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. The coffee was thick with grounds. The blue china cup was chipped at its edges. She had purchased it, as is, at a secondhand store in the city of Spokane. My mother’s eyes were as dark as the eyes of a salmon who has just returned to the place where it was spawned.

  “Jonah,” she said to me and laughed. My mother had named me after a man who’d survived a miracle. Because of that, she seemed to regard every action of mine, no matter how ordinary, as a miracle of its own. That morning, as I stepped into her kitchen, fresh from a dream of war, my mother pointed at the miracle of my fevered face and mussed hair. She set her cup on the table and took me into her arms. She said my name again and laughed, as if I had truly just emerged from the belly of a whale, and not from the belly of a dream where the enemy soldiers wore surgical gloves and white smocks.