The Toughest Indian in the World

by Sherman Alexie

  “I mean,” said Wonder Horse. “What’s with all this Bible talk?”

  “Ain’t Bible talk,” said Sweetwater. “It’s just something I learned. Jesus was a carpenter.”

  “Well, hell, anybody can call themselves a carpenter,” said Wonder Horse. “I mean, those Tulee boys built themselves a tree house over yonder. I guess that makes them carpenters, but it sure don’t make them good carpenters. That thing is going to roll out of that tree like a bowling ball.”

  “I suppose, but the thing is, Jesus was Jesus, enit? I mean, Jesus must have been a good carpenter. I mean, he was Jesus, enit? That’s pretty powerful right there.”

  “You know,” said Wonder Horse. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why is that?”

  “Come on,” said Sweetwater, his voice cracking with one emotion or another. “He was Jesus. He could walk on water and, like, conjure up fish and bread and stuff.”

  “Is that it? Stuff? Stuff? Is that your whole proof on this thing? All that proves is that Jesus might have been a good magician. He might have been a good fisherman. He might have been a good baker. But it absolutely does not prove that he was a good carpenter. I mean, there Jesus was, running all over the place, trying to save the world. Do you really think he had time to study carpentry? Do you really think he had the time to study his tools, to memorize them, to understand them? Do you really think he had the time to devote himself to wood?”

  “He was the Son of God. I think he could multitask.”

  “Multitask!” shouted Wonder Horse. “Multitask! Where do you learn that shit?”

  “Television.”

  “Television? Television? Is that all you have to say to me?”

  “I guess,” said Sweetwater.

  They were building a wheelchair ramp for my father, who was coming home because he didn’t want to die in the hospital.

  Inside the house, I was looking for those things that could kill my father, for those things that had already killed him, or rather had already assigned to him an appointment with death, an appointment he would not and could not miss. Among the most dangerous or near-dangerous: two boxes of donuts buried beneath Pendleton blankets on the top shelf of his closet; a quart of chocolate milk lying flat in the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer; a six-pack of soda pop submerged in the lukewarm water of the toilet tank; hard candy stuffed deeply into the pockets of every coat he owned; and then more hard candy stuffed into the pockets of my late mother’s coats, my siblings’ long-abandoned coats, and the coats I wore when I was a child, still hanging in the closet in the bedroom where I had not slept in ten years. Together, these items represented my father’s first line of defense. He knew they would be found easily. He intended them to be found easily. Decoys. Camouflage. My father was smart. He’d sacrifice a few treasures in order to distract me from the large caches. In the garage, I poured out ten pounds of Hershey’s chocolate kisses one by one from an aluminum gas can. In the attic, I wore gloves and long sleeves when I pulled seven Payday peanut bars from between layers of fiberglass insulation. I flipped through fifty-two westerns, twelve mysteries, and nine true-crime books, and discovered one hundred and twelve fruit wraps pressed tightly between the pages. Inside the doghouse, a Tupperware container filled with Oreo cookies was duct-taped to the ceiling. I gathered all of it, all of those things that my father stupidly loved, and filled seven shopping bags. Most people would have quit searching then, assured they’d emptied the house of its dangers, but I knew my father. I could see him. I could read his mind. I found three pounds of loose sugar waiting beneath three inches of flour in the flour sack. Carefully hidden beneath a layer of frost, popsicles were frozen to the freezer walls. How could my father accomplish such a thing? What were the mechanics? I had no idea, but I found my father’s sweet treasures, proving once again that the result is more important than the process. In his bedroom, I lifted the northwest corner of the carpet and found more candy bars, moldy, apparently forgotten. But then, remembering my father’s clever mind, I pulled the carpet back a few more inches, and discovered new chocolate bars carefully wrapped in aluminum foil. I filled more shopping bags (two, nine, thirteen bags) and carried them outside, past Wonder Horse and Sweetwater pounding the last few nails into place, and tossed the bags in a pile on the road. There, with the sky clear and blue, I doused those bags with kerosene and dropped a burning match on the pile.

  Later that day, I lifted my father from the passenger seat of my van, a Ford with more than two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. My father carried sixty-five years on his odometer and had lost forty pounds in the last few months. I carried him easily over to his electric wheelchair (purchased for five hundred dollars from a white woman whose paraplegic husband had died) and set him in the worn leather seat. He looked so frail that I wondered if he had the strength to move the joystick that powered the chair.

  “Can you make it?” I asked.

  Of course he could. He was a man who used to teach ballroom dancing, back when he was young and strong and financing his communications education at the University of Washington (he’d always meant to start his own radio station on the reservation). He was the man who had taught me how to waltz about fifteen minutes before I’d left to pick up my date for the high school prom. I’d always wondered how we looked: two tall Indian men, father and son, spinning around the living room of a reservation HUD house.

  My father guided the wheelchair up the ramp. I wasn’t nervous about its construction. I trusted Sweetwater and Wonder Horse. I knew the ramp would hold.

  “Sweet and Wonder?” asked my father, using the nicknames only men of a certain generation were allowed to use.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But they got in a fight about Jesus. I don’t think they’re on speaking terms now.”

  “They’re like an old married couple, enit?”

  “They’ll kiss and make up.”

  “They always do.”

  My mother had died ten years earlier from a brain tumor. She had been a librarian, a lover of books. By the end of her life, she could no longer speak, let alone read, so she had no last words from her deathbed, only the slow blinking of her eyes, and then the fading of the light behind them. It had been a quiet death for a woman with such a large vocabulary.

  I followed my father and his chair into the house. He had not been here in some weeks and so was surprised to see the amount of home improvement I had done myself or had paid others to do. Or rather, he was surprised at the improvements he could see, since his vision was impaired by the blood that flowed from the broken veins in his eyes. The walls were painted a fresh white, a new carpet had replaced the twenty-five-year-old shag, and family photographs were fitted with new frames. Cosmetic changes, really, but my father acted as if I’d built him a mansion.

  “You’re good to me,” he said. I didn’t know if that was completely true, or if it had ever been true, even in part.

  “You didn’t have to do this,” he said. “I’m not going to live long enough to get it ugly again.”

  “Hey,” I said. “They always underestimate Indians. You’re going to make it until next Christmas, at least. You eat better and you’ll see Paul graduate high school.”

  Paul was my son. He lived with his Lummi Indian mother in Seattle, exactly two hundred and seventy-nine miles from my house in Spokane. She’d remarried a white man who made a lot more money than I did. He was a consultant for one thing or another—one of those jobs that only white guys seem to get. Consultant. He consulted. Others paid him to consult. They wanted to be consulted. He wanted to consult. All around me, white men were consulting other white men. My son lived with a consultor, or was it spelled differently? Did my son live with a consulter? The whole world could live in the space between that o and that e. My son lived in that space. My son asked another man for consultation. He was an Indian consultantee loved fiercely by a white consultant. Sure, my vocabulary was bitter (She’d chosen somebody over me!) but I was happy the white man, the stepfat
her, was able to provide my son with a better life than I would have on my high school English teacher’s salary. And I was happy that my son was living in Seattle, where twenty percent of the city was brown-skinned, instead of Spokane, where ninety-nine percent of the people were white. I’m not exactly racist. I like white people as a theory; I’m just not crazy about them in practice. But, all in all, ours was a good divorce. I still loved my ex-wife, without missing her or our marriage (I’m a liar), and spent every other weekend, all of the major holidays, and most of the minor ones, with the three of them in Seattle—all of us having decided to make it work, as the therapists had said. The nontraditional arrangement, this extended family, was strange when measured by white standards, but was very traditional by Indian standards. What is an Indian? Is it a child who can stroll unannounced through the front doors of seventeen different houses?

  “How long before Paul graduates?” asked my father as we stood (I was the only one standing!) in our house. No, it wasn’t my house anymore. Only my ghost lived there now.

  “Nine months,” I said. “In June.”

  “Six to five against me making it.”

  He always knew the odds. He’d always been a gambler and had lost more than one paycheck to the horses and the dogs and the Sonics and the Seahawks and the Mariners and the dice and the playing cards.

  “I’ll bet twenty bucks you make it,” I said.

  “I expect you to throw that Andrew Jackson in the coffin with me.”

  “I expect you to buy me lunch in July.”

  He wheeled himself into his bedroom at the back of the house. I hadn’t changed anything about his personal space, knowing that he would have resented the invasion.

  “What did you do in here?” he asked.

  “Can’t you tell?” I asked.

  “Son, I’m mostly blind in one eye and I can’t see much out of the other.”

  “Everything is the same,” I said (I lied) and wondered how long it would be before his vision left him forever.

  His room had been the same for the last ten years, since my mother’s death. (His wife! His wife! Of course, that’s how he remembered her!) The same ratty chair, the same bookshelf overflowing with the same books, the same bed with the same two-by-fours holding it together. I’d been conceived in that bed, or so the legend goes. Of course, according to my father, I’d also been conceived in the front and/or backseat (and trunk!) of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu; in a telephone booth in downtown Seattle; on the seventeenth floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Minneapolis; on the living room couch during halftime of a Duke-North Carolina basketball game; in a powwow tepee in Browning, Montana; and amid the broken eggs and expired milk of a 7-Eleven walk-in freezer in Phoenix, Arizona.

  I missed my mother like crazy. During all of my childhood bedtimes, she’d read me books (Whitman! Dickinson!) I could not understand and would not understand until many years later.

  What is an Indian? Is it a boy who can sing the body electric or a woman who could not stop for death?

  My siblings, three brothers and two sisters, were scattered in the indigenous winds, all of them living on somebody else’s reservation with lovers whose blood came from a dozen different tribes. I’d lost track of the number of nieces and nephews I had, but I didn’t feel too guilty about that because I’m quite sure that my brothers had also lost track of the number of kids they’d helped conceive (the Fathers of our Country!).

  Though I didn’t see my siblings much, perhaps two or three times a year at family and tribal gatherings, we’d always been happy to see one another and had easily fallen back into our comfortable patterns: hugs, kisses, genial insults, then the stories about our mother, and finally the all-night games of Scrabble. None of us had ever found the need to chastise any of the others for our long absences from each other. We’d all pursued our very different versions of the American Dream (the Native American Dream!) and had all been successful to one degree or another. We were teacher, truck driver, logger, accountant, preacher, and guitar player. Our biggest success: we were all alive. Our biggest claim to fame: we were all sober.

  In his bedroom, my father spun slow circles in his wheelchair. In his wallet, he kept photographs of all of his children, and pulled them out three or four times a day to examine them. He thought this small ceremony was a secret. Those photographs were wrinkled and faded with age and the touch of my father’s hands.

  “Look at me,” he said as he spun in a figure eight. “I’m Mary Lou Retton.”

  “Ten, ten, ten, but the East German gives him a three,” I said, reading the imaginary scores.

  “Damn East Germans,” said my father. He stopped spinning and tried to catch his breath.

  “I’m an old man,” he said.

  “Hey, aren’t you tired?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I could sleep.”

  “You want to help me get you into bed?” I asked, carefully phrasing the question, setting down the pronouns in the most polite order. Of course, it was a rhetorical question. He couldn’t have made it by himself but he didn’t want to admit to his weakness by asking for help, and I didn’t want to point out his weakness by helping him without asking first. The unasked question, the unspoken answer, and so we remained quiet men in a country of quiet men.

  “I am tired,” he said.

  I picked him up, marveling again at how small he had become, and laid him down on his bed. I slid a pillow beneath his head and pulled a quilt over him. He looked up at me with his dark, Asian-shaped eyes. I’d inherited those eyes and their eccentric shapes. I wondered what else my father and I had constructed in our lives together. What skyscrapers, what houses, and what small rooms with uneven floors? I had never doubted his love for me, not once, and understood it to be enormous. I certainly loved him, but I didn’t know what exact shapes our love took when we pulled it (tenderness, regret, anger, and hope) out of our bodies and offered it for public inspection, for careful forensics.

  “Go to sleep,” I whispered to my father. “I’ll make you some soup when you wake up.”

  I’d left the reservation when I was eighteen years old, leaving with the full intention of coming back after I’d finished college. I had never wanted to contribute to the brain drain, to be yet another of the best and brightest Indians to abandon his or her tribe to the Indian leaders who couldn’t spell the word sovereignty. Yet no matter my idealistic notions, I have never again lived with my tribe. I left the reservation for the same reason a white kid leaves the cornfields of Iowa, or the coal mines of Pennsylvania, or the oil derricks of Texas: ambition. And I stayed away for the same reasons the white kids stayed away: more ambition. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the reservation when I was a child and I suppose I love it now as an adult (I live only sixty-five miles away), but it’s certainly a different sort of love. As an adult, I am fully conscious of the reservation’s weaknesses, its inherent limitations (geographic, social, economic, and spiritual), but as a child I’d believed the reservation to be an endless, magical place.

  When I was six years old, a bear came out of hibernation too early, climbed up on the roof of the Catholic Church, and promptly fell back asleep. In itself not an amazing thing, but what had amazed me then, and amazes me now, is that nobody, not one Spokane Indian, bothered that bear. Nobody called the police or the Forest Service. None of the Indian hunters took advantage of a defenseless animal, even those Indian hunters who’d always taken advantage of defenseless animals and humans. Hell, even the reservation dogs stopped barking whenever they strolled past the church. We all, dogs and Indians alike, just continued on with our lives, going to work or school, playing basketball and hide-and-seek, scratching at fleas, sleeping with other people’s spouses, marking our territory, while that bear slept on.

  During that brief and magical time, “How’s the bear?” replaced “How are you doing?” as the standard greeting.

  What is an Indian? Is it the lead actor in a miracle or the witness who remembers the miracle?

  For three
or four days, that bear (that Indian!) had slept, unmolested, dreaming his bear dreams, until the bright sun had disturbed him one sunrise. Bob May happened to be there with his camera and shot up a roll of film as the bear climbed down from the church, stretched his spine and legs, and then ambled off into the woods, never to be seen again.

  But all of that was years ago, decades ago, long before I brought my father home from the hospital to die, before I left him alone in his bedroom where he dreamed his diabetic dreams.

  What is an Indian? Is it a son who can stand in a doorway and watch his father sleep?

  Just after sundown, I woke my father from his nap, set him in his wheelchair, and rolled him into the kitchen.

  “Do you remember that Catholic bear?” I asked him as we ate tomato soup at the table, which was really just a maple-wood door nailed to four two-by-sixes. The brass doorknob was still attached. The tomato soup was homemade, from my father’s recipe. He’d once been the head chef at Ankeny’s, the best restaurant in Spokane. I’d waited tables there one summer and made fifty bucks in tips every shift. Good money for an eighteen-year-old. Better yet, I’d lost my virginity on a cool July evening to a waitress named Carla, a white woman who was twenty years older. She’d always called me sweetheart and had let me sleep with her only once. Any more than that, she’d said, and you’re going to fall in love with me, and then I’ll just have to break your heart. I’d been grateful to her and told her so. I never saw her again after that summer, but I sent her Christmas cards for ten years, even though I’d never received a response, and only stopped when the last card had been returned with no forwarding address.

  “The one that climbed on the church?” asked my father, remembering. His hand trembled as he lifted his spoon to his lips. He’d slept for three hours but he still looked exhausted.

  “Yeah, what do you think happened to it?” I asked.