Sherman alexie a drug called tradition

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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Sherman Alexie

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For Bob, Dick, Mark, and Ron

For Adrian, Joy, Leslie, Simon, and all those Native writers whose words and music have made mine possible

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Contents Prologue

Introduction Every Little Hurricane A Drug Called Tradition

Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at

Woodstock Crazy Horse Dreams

The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore

Amusements This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

The Fun House All I Wanted to Do Was Dance

The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire Distances

Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation

A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result

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A Good Story The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue

Imagining the Reservation The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor

Indian Education The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Family Portrait Somebody Kept Saying Powwow

Witnesses, Secret and Not Flight

Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show

A Biography of Sherman Alexie

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There’s a little bit of magic in everything and then some loss to even things out.

—Lou Reed

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing

the root of my own furious love. —Joy Harjo

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Prologue An email exchange between Jess Walter and Sherman Alexie

From: Sherman Alexie 
 To: Jess Walter 
 Sent: Thursday, June 20
 Subject: Twentieth Anniversary Lone Ranger and Tonto

SA: So I’ve been trying to write the intro to the 20th anniversary edition, but it feels too self-congratulatory, so do you want to have an email exchange about it and use that as the intro?

JW: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is 20!?! Your email sent me scurrying to my signed copy. I looked at the jacket photo and there you are, with the greatest Breakfast Club pro-wrestling warrior mullet of all time.

SA: The rez mullet! I also find my former haircut amusing in stylistic terms. It’s embarrassing now. But there’s always been a conscious and subconscious classist/racist edge to mullet jokes, especially when it comes to white guys with mullets. If one means to tell a racist/classist joke, then make it a good one, but I

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don’t actually think that many folks realize the cultural importance of the mullet in Native American warrior history. Take a look at Chief Joseph.

Unravel those braids, my friend, and you’ve got a legendary mullet, comparable to mine. The contemporary motto for the mullet wearer is “business in front, party in the back,” but the Indian mullet warrior motto was “I don’t want my hair to get in my eyes as I’m kicking your ass.” The Indian mullet motto, coincidentally or not, is the same as the motto for hockey mullet wearers. Somebody needs to do a study …

Looking at my hair through a slightly more serious lens, I think I wore such an exaggerated mullet as a means of aggressively declaring my Indian identity. And my class identity. When The Lone Ranger was published, I was being fêted by the publishing world while I was back living on the rez, after college. I was called “one of the major lyric voices of our time” but at the same time I was sleeping in a U.S. Army surplus bed in the unfinished basement bedroom in my family’s government- built house.

The contrast between my literary life and my real life was epic. Scary. Even dangerous. And it felt epic, scary, and dangerous for many years.

My mullet was an insecurity shield. My mullet was an

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ethnic hatchet. My mullet was an arrow on fire. My mullet said to the literary world, “Hello, you privileged

prep-school assholes, I’m here to steal your thunder, lightning, and book sales.”

JW: Yes, undoubtedly: Chief Joseph’s business in front carries more power and meaning than say, Brian Bosworth’s. (My own unfortunate mullet included a braided rattail—just in case I wasn’t white trash enough.) And in your author photo from that time there is a fierce, steady engagement in your eyes that reflects exactly that quality in the book—you are drawn in by the humor, the sorrow, and the anger over injustice, the steady and unblinking cost of admission. I remember so clearly the reviews you were getting, and especially that phrase from the New York Times Book Review’s cover story on The Business of Fancydancing—“one of the major lyric voices of our time”—but I couldn’t have comprehended the pressure that such praise brings, especially the identity component of it, and so early in your writing life. To follow those reviews with a book like Lone Ranger, is, frankly, kind of fucking remarkable. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction and garnered even more praise, but it must have felt like even more weight; every writer dreams of “stunning” and “dazzling,” but The

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Chicago Tribune writing, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.” What does a 26-year-old do with that?

The pressure of straddling two worlds comes through in Lone Ranger. In “A Good Story,” the gap is represented by the sweetest bit of postmodernist breaking of the fourth wall, in which you, the author, seem to be lying on the couch and your mother pleads with you to “write a story about something good.”

Another example of the disparate worlds you’ve suddenly found yourself straddling is one of my all-time-favorite stories, “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” which begins with a wonderfully apt epigraph from Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Your name, your boy’s name: Joseph. You almost seem to be staking out territory on the literary side of that divide, and having to defend yourself to both sides. That story also moves toward something I see in your work—a brotherhood in class, Thomas on the bus to prison with “four African men, one Chicano, and a white man from the smallest town in the state,” delivering them to “a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack.”

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SA: And now I remember a New Yorker magazine party early in my career when I stepped out of a penthouse apartment elevator and saw Stephen King and Salman Rushdie hugging each other. What does a rez boy do with that visual information?

Oh boy, do I still feel like a class warrior in the literary world. In the whole world, really. These stories are drenched in poverty and helplessness.

We’ve talked about this a few times. I often make the joke that your trailer park poverty makes my rez poverty look good.

But that’s an overlooked part of these stories, I think. I grew up in the tribe called the Rural Poor, as did you, and I don’t think folks think of us that way. I grew up in wheat fields. I grew up climbing to the tops of pine trees. I grew up angry and ready to punch a rich guy in the ear.

So, yeah, realism is my thing in this book. Autobiography, too. Not an autobiography of details but an autobiography of the soul.

One thing: I wrote this book in the middle of a decade-long effort to believe in God. So it’s curious to see the uncynical God hunger in the boy I was.

JW: Oh man! That’s a little more high-powered hug than you and I hugging at the LA Times Book Festival in 1996. I still

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remember, you said, “What are you doing here?” Then you introduced me to Helen Fielding, of all people. “This is Jess Walter, the second-best writer from Stevens County, Washington.” And we both laughed, because you and I knew that I was the ONLY other writer from Stevens County, Washington.

To my shame now, I grew up embarrassed about being bluecollar, a first-generation college student, a 19-year-old father. We usually think of passing in terms of race, but people try to pass as another class, too. I did that.

You, however, seemed to know—at least as a writer—to claim class as a subject, that literature belongs to the poor shits, too. Your stories are sneaky that way: They confront readers on that level; there’s a quiet insistence that THIS WORLD is as rich a literary world as London or New York, that Benjamin Lake can be as profound a place as Walden Pond, that Tshimikain Creek can have every bit as much literary resonance as the Thames.

But place and class are only part of the story. Many people tell me that they had no picture of contemporary reservation life, or even urban Indian life, until reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . To break Indians out of museums and movies and Chief Wahoo—that’s a legacy for any book. The book and Smoke Signals gave many their first picture of contemporary Native American life.

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Autobiography of the soul is a great phrase. I remember someone on the reservation telling me back when I covered the Spokane Tribe and your book came up, “You know what that book seemed like to me? The news.”

So, what do you make of people who have called your work “magical realism”? I wonder if there isn’t a cultural gap in that phrase, a whiff of colonialism. I’m a big García Márquez fan and reading his autobiography is not so much different than reading his fiction.

SA: Describing my book as “magical realism” does make me feel like a witch doctor in blue jeans. I’ve got a friend who calls me Shaman Perplexy. I like that. Isn’t all fiction (and nonfiction) magical realism? Aren’t we all making shit up, and if we do it well enough, it can feel surreal? Anyway, I’m not nearly as much of a magical realist as Flannery O’Connor.

What is your favorite story in the book?

JW: What feels surreal to me are those stories of kids growing up on the Upper East Side, going to summer camp, then prep school, then choosing between Harvard and Yale … sci-fi.

“Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother …” is a huge story, dreamy and plaintive. I’m not surprised to hear you were contemplating your faith as you worked on this book. I have a sentimental sweet "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

spot for the stories about basketball, especially “Indian Education” and “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore.” One of my favorite first lines is from “The First Annual All-Indian Horse Shoe Pitch and Barbecue”: “Somebody forgot the charcoal; blame the BIA.” But I think the story that moved me the most at the time was “This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” When I went back to that story, I was amazed you accomplished all of that in 16 pages. That story was a novel in my mind.

Jess Walter is the author of eight books, including the bestseller Beautiful Ruins and The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award. He grew up in Spokane and on a small ranch bordering the Spokane Reservation. He and Sherman Alexie have been friends for twenty years.

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Introduction IN FEBRUARY 1992 Hanging Loose Press of Brooklyn, New York, published my first book of poems and stories, The Business of Fancydancing, and I figured it would sell two hundred copies, one hundred and twenty-five of them purchased by my mother. After all, it was a first book by a twenty-six-year-old Spokane Reservation Indian boy from eastern Washington. There was a good chance it would only sell twenty-two copies, seventeen of them purchased by my mother, the formalist, who constantly asked me why my poems didn’t rhyme.

“It’s free verse,” I said. “And some of them do rhyme. I’ve written sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. I’ve written in iambic pentameter.”

“What’s that?” “It’s the ba-bump, ba-bump sound of the heartbeat, of the

deer running through the green pine forest, of the eagle singing its way through the sky.”

“Don’t pull that Indian shaman crap on me,” my mother said.

So my mother certainly wasn’t impressed by my indigenous rhetoric, but she would have been deliriously happy if I’d

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become a messianic doctor or lawyer (or a doctor or lawyer with only a messiah complex) and saved the tribe. In a capitalistic sense, that’s what the tribe needed (and still needs). But I was a former premedicine major who couldn’t handle human anatomy, and I knew far too many lawyers, so I chose the third most lucrative pursuit: small-press poetry.

My family was surprised, but they weren’t disappointed. Since I was one of the few people from my tribe to ever go to college, I was already a success story. My mother worked a series of low-wage social-work jobs for the tribe, and my father was a randomly employed blue-collar alcoholic. I made more money delivering pizzas than they did while working far more important jobs. I might have been considered a black sheep if I’d come from a more financially successful family, but my literary ambitions made me a white sheep, albeit a lamb who published in tiny poetry magazines like The Black Bear Review, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, Impetus, and Slipstream.

Don’t get me wrong. I was excited and proud to be a publishing poet (and still have copies of every journal where I’ve been published), but I also kept my day job as a program information coordinator (secretary) for People to People, a high school international-exchange program in Spokane. I knew that I would eventually return to college (I left three credits shy of my

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B.A. in American studies), get that degree, and then trudge through graduate school in creative writing. But I was in no hurry to do that. I just wanted to write my poems (and the occasional story) and live as cheaply as possible. I knew how to live in poverty, having grown up on an American third-world reservation, so my urban six-dollars-an-hour job was almost luxurious.

But a New York Times Book Review editor named Rich Nicholls changed my life when he noticed The Business of Fancydancing lying in an office slush pile. As he later told me, he thought the cover was extraordinarily beautiful—it featured a surreal photograph of a Navajo fancydancer that some readers wrongly assumed was my self-portrait—and that was the primary reason he picked it up and flipped through the pages. He assigned the book, as well as a few others as part of a survey of contemporary Native American literature, to James Kincaid, an English professor at the University of Southern California. My Hanging Loose editors were shocked to hear one of their books was being reviewed, because there are Pulitzer Prize–winning poets whose books don’t get covered in the Times. And more shocking, my book was part of a front-page review. Yep, right there on the cover of the Times Book Review was a photograph of some Indian guy on a motorcycle (I’m terrified of any vehicle

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with less than four wheels), and inside that review was Mr. Kincaid declaring me “one of the major lyric voices of our time.”

I was sitting at my desk at People to People when my Hanging Loose editor, Bob Hershon, faxed me an advance copy of the review. I read it once, ran to the bathroom to throw up, then returned to my desk to read one sentence again and again: “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”

As Keanu Reeves, the Hawaiian balladeer, would say, “Whoa.”

I didn’t believe I was one of the major lyric voices of our time (though I’m probably in the top 503 by now), but I guessed that review was going to help my career. In fact, that review tossed my ass over the stadium fence directly into the big leagues. After Kincaid’s compliments went public, I started receiving phone calls from agents and editors. Many phone calls. Dozens of calls. A Hollywood producer interrogated me.

“Are the film rights available?” he asked. “Well, yeah,” I said. “But you know it’s a book of poems?” “What do you mean, a book of poems?” “I mean, poems, you know, with skinny lines, stanzas,

mostly free verse, but some rhyming stuff, too. My mom thinks they’re pretty cool.”

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“You mean poem poems?” “Yes.” “Do your poems tell a story?” “Most of them are narrative.” “That’s good, that’s good. Could you send me a copy of the

book?” “You haven’t read it?” “No,” he said. “But I read the review. The review was

great.” Dozens of agents and editors loved the review (though I

wonder how many of them had read the book), and they all wanted to know if I wrote fiction.

“Well,” I said to them. “It’s not just a book of poetry. There are four short stories in there, too. And a lot of prose poems.”

“But do you write fiction?” “I have a manuscript of short stories. There must be thirty

or forty stories in it.” “But do you write fiction?” I didn’t realize that “fiction” was a synonym for “Sure,

we’ll publish your book of obscure short stories as long as we can also publish your slightly less obscure first novel as part of a two-book deal.”

I was terrified by all of these big-time agents and editors,

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and especially of one particular agent, who enjoyed more fame and fortune than any of her clients did.

“Send me the manuscript today,” the famous agent ordered. Bullied, terrified, and naive, I sent her my manuscript of

short stories, glacially printed out by a five-hundred-dollar Brother word processor.

“You’re not ready,” she said after she’d read them. “I’ll take you on as a client, but we’re going to have to work on these stories for a year or two before I send them out to publishers.”

I was shocked. I had been dreaming about immediate fame and fortune.

“But wait,” I said. “I thought I was one of the major lyric voices of our time.”

“According to the manuscript I’ve got sitting in front of me, you’re not even one of the major lyric voices on my desk.”

Ouch. That one really hurt. And this woman wanted to be my agent? Was that how agents were supposed to talk to their clients? And who the hell was I, calling myself one of the major lyric voices of our time? I was wondering if I should get business cards that identified me as such, or perhaps leave it on my answering machine.

Hello, you’ve reached Sherman Alexie, one of the major lyric voices of our time. Please leave a message if you’re not too

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intimidated and I’ll get back to you, with my versatile and mellifluous voice, as soon as possible.

Of course, these days my wife, Diane, only refers to me as “one of the major lyric voices of our time” when I stutter or mispronounce a word or say something so inane and arrogant that it defies logic. A few years ago, as we argued about the potential danger in using a cracked coffeepot, I shouted, “You can’t heat cracked glass! It will shatter! I majored in chemistry! I know glass! What do you know about glass?”

Yep, I have just offered you scientific proof of the majorness of my voice.

“But the thing is,” I said to the famous agent. “I think my stories are pretty good. And I hate to be repetitive, but they said I’m one of the major lyric voices of our time.”

“These stories are not major. But you’ve got potential. I’m a great editor. If we take it slow, we can make this book the best it can be.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping things would go much faster.”

“Going fast would be a mistake for you.” “I don’t want to go slow. I can’t afford to go slow.” “Then we won’t be working together. Call me if you change

your mind.”

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She hung up without saying good-bye. I’d always heard of people who hung up without saying good-bye. I’d seen them on television and in movies, but I’d never talked to somebody who hung up without saying good-bye. She remains the only person I know who has ever hung up on me without saying good-bye.

I still owe her a phone call. I would love to call her up and say, “Well, Miss Fifteen

Percent, we published this book at the speed of the light, and it’s now in its 1,220,342nd printing, and it was the basis for a really cool movie called Smoke Signals. Maybe you’ve heard of the movie? It was released by Miramax, yes, Miramax, that’s spelled M-I-R-A-M-A-X, and the movie won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. Yes, that’s Robert Freaking Redford’s Sundance Film Festival! And I’ve published one million books since that first one, and I’ve hugged Stephen King and been kissed on the cheek by Ally Sheedy and sat in a big couch in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s living room while my feet dangled off the floor, so perhaps you were wrong about EVERYTHING! And by the way, what do you know about glass?”

As they say, revenge is a dish best served with the introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition of a book of short stories.

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Eventually, despite my narcissism and naïveté, and thanks to the recommendations of friends, I met the agent Nancy Stauffer Cahoon, who, after reading my manuscript, said something beautiful and surprising.

“That story, ‘Flight,’ the one about the kid and the jet,” she said. “That reminds me of James Tate’s poem ‘The Lost Pilot.’”

“Wow,” I said, falling in literary love. “That story was directly influenced by that poem. Nobody has ever noticed that.”

“You had me at hello,” Renée Zellweger said to Tom Cruise.

“You had me at James Tate,” I said to Nancy. Okay, I didn’t really say that to her. But I was impressed

that she talked to me first in artistic terms and only later in financial terms. I hired her immediately (or does the agent hire the writer?), worked with her to edit the manuscript, and immediately cut “Flight” and a dozen other stories. As a sentimental gesture, I’ve added “Flight” and “Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show” to this edition. I think we deleted “Flight” from the original book because it sounds more like children’s literature and “Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show” because it contains themes more adroitly covered in other stories. Read them for yourself and decide whether we should have kept them.

After Nancy and I got the manuscript into shape, we sent it

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to twelve or fifteen publishers and set up an auction date. I was going to be auctioned as a literate steer! On a Friday in January 1993, six or eight publishers joined the bidding. During the auction, I updated Bob Hershon, my Hanging Loose god, and Diane, my new girlfriend (and now wife). By the end of the day, Morgan Entrekin and Atlantic Monthly Press had won the auction; then published the book in September 1993. During the twenty-seven-city book tour that followed, I worked with and became friends with, and owe many thanks to, Morgan, Judy Hottensen, Miwa Messer, and Eric Price, my original Dream Team at Grove.

Grove won that original auction with an amount of cash that absolutely boggled my mind. My parents hadn’t made that much money in the last ten years combined. I ran outside, jumped into a snowbank, and made angels.

I was rich, rich, rich. Okay, to be more accurate, I was middle-class, middle-class, middle-class. But that was a huge leap. I was the first Alexie to ever become middle-class and all because I wrote stories and poems about being a poor Indian growing up in an alcoholic family on an alcoholic reservation.

This book could have easily been titled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Get Drunk, Fistfight, and Then Fall into Each Other’s Arms and Confess Their Undying Platonic Love for Each Other

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in Heaven Followed by a Long Evening of Hot Dog Regurgitation and Public Urination.

When the book was first published, I was (and continue to be) vilified in certain circles for my alcohol-soaked stories. Rereading them, I suppose my critics have a point. Everybody in this book is drunk or in love with a drunk. And in writing about drunk Indians, I am dealing with stereotypical material. But I can only respond with the truth. In my family, counting parents, siblings, and dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins, there are less than a dozen who are currently sober, and only a few who have never drank. When I write about the destructive effects of alcohol on Indians, I am not writing out of a literary stance or a colonized mind’s need to reinforce stereotypes. I am writing autobiography.

When this book was first reviewed, people often commented on its autobiographical nature, and that always pissed me off.

“You see the description on the book,” I would say. “It says ‘Fiction.’ That’s what this book is.”

Of course, I was full of shit. This book is a thinly disguised memoir. I was a child at the crazy New Year’s Eve party depicted in “Every Little Hurricane.” My mother did punch another woman in the face during that party. My father and

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cousin did break through the basement door while playing full- contact Nerf basketball and roll down the stairs together. The best truth about that story is that my mother did stop drinking after that horrible night and has remained sober since. The worst truth? My father never did get sober. He was in residential treatment a few times, attended dozens of AA meetings, took Antabuse, made endless promises to his family and himself, but ended up on dialysis machines during his last years and lost a foot to diabetes before he passed away in March 2003. O my drunk and lovely father! He was one of the Indians who tossed his drunken friend onto the roller coaster in “Amusements.” How could one Indian have done such a thing to another Indian? I never asked my father why he did it, but I wrote a story about why I thought it happened, and even after my father read the story, I still didn’t have the courage to ask him why he did it. How lame is that?

What else is true? My best friend, Steve, and I traveled to Phoenix to pick up his father’s ashes just like Victor and Thomas do in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” though the fictional father was much more like my father than Steve’s. And yes, there was a flexible gymnast on the airplane during the trip who told Steve and me that she was the first alternate on the 1984 Olympic team. Is that woman out there somewhere? Does

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she remember two Indian guys sitting across from her on a Morris Air flight from Spokane through Salt Lake City to Phoenix?

A terrified mouse did run up my aunt’s pant leg, but I wildly exaggerated the aftermath in “The Fun House.” My aunt didn’t go swimming in the creek, never felt a need to divorce her husband or leave her son, and she was mad at me for suggesting otherwise.

“Junior,” she said. “People are going to think that really happened.”

“But it did really happen, Auntie. At least the mouse part. It’s a true story.”

“Yeah, but it’s truer when it’s in a book.” “Indian Education” is a true (and truer) account of my

public school days. I still have nightmares about missing those two free throws to lose that basketball game against Ritzville. Twenty years later, I can tell you that Doug Wellsandt, Ritzville’s star, had just fouled out after he intentionally knocked me to the ground to prevent me from hitting an easy layup. While I stood at the line to shoot the free throws with six seconds on the clock, Ritzville had Keith Humphrey, John Powers, Doug Koch, Miles Curtis, and Jeff McBroom on the court while my teammates—Steve LeBret, Shaun Soliday, John

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Graham, and Brett Springer—were praying for me to win the game. We had come from sixteen points down in the fourth quarter! It would have been a miracle victory! But I missed those fucking free throws, clanging the ball off the rim twice. Until that point, I had been a 90 percent free-throw shooter. After that night, I was a 50 percent loser. I was a victim of a high school basketball form of Post-Traumatic Free-Throw Stress Syndrome. When I see any of my former teammates now, they still tease me about losing that game. A year after those misses, I hit two free throws and two jump shots in the last minute to win a bigger game against Ritzville, but I never dream about that. Hell, my joy in winning is always much smaller than my pain in losing.

I’m a poet who can whine in meter. And just like the father-son team in “Witnesses, Secret and

Not,” my father and I once traveled to Spokane because the police wanted to talk to him about a long-missing and presumed dead Indian man. And yes, my father knew who killed and buried that man, as do most of the people on my reservation. The police know, too, but they can’t make a case against the killer. I see that man now and again. He’s soft-spoken, funny, and always wears slacks and button-down dress shirts. He once ate dinner at my house while I worried what he might do with his knife and fork. But that’s a whole different story, isn’t it?

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So why am I telling you that these stories are true? First of all, they’re not really true. They are the vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain wrong. But in trying to make them true and real, I am writing what might be called reservation realism.

What is the definition of reservation realism? Well, I’ll let you read the book and figure that out for yourself.

As for me, in rereading these stories, some of them written when I was only nineteen years old, I feel like I’m listening to a stranger’s dreams. The younger version of me is angrier, more impulsive, and deathly afraid of physical description. Every dang Indian in this book is described as being identically dark skinned, with the same long black hair. It’s the Stepford Tribe of Indians. There might be five or six pine trees and a couple of rivers and streams, one grizzly bear and a lot of dogs, but that’s about all the flora and fauna you’re going to get. It’s simple stuff but manages to feel more concentrated rather than sparse. It’s funny, too. I laughed a few times at the old jokes, new to me after ten years. But mostly it feels sad, often hopeless, and hot with loneliness. I kept trying to figure out the main topic, the big theme, the overarching idea, the epicenter. And it is this: the sons in this book really love and hate their fathers.

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EVERY LITTLE HURRICANE

ALTHOUGH IT WAS WINTER , the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.

It was January and Victor was nine years old. He was sleeping in his bedroom in the basement of the HUD house when it happened. His mother and father were upstairs, hosting the largest New Year’s Eve party in tribal history, when the winds increased and the first tree fell.

“Goddamn it,” one Indian yelled at another as the argument began. “You ain’t shit, you fucking apple.”

The two Indians raged across the room at each other. One was tall and heavy, the other was short, muscular. High-pressure and low-pressure fronts.

The music was so loud that Victor could barely hear the voices as the two Indians escalated the argument into a fistfight. Soon there were no voices to be heard, only guttural noises that could have been curses or wood breaking. Then the music "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

stopped so suddenly that the silence frightened Victor. “What the fuck’s going on?” Victor’s father yelled, his

voice coming quickly and with force. It shook the walls of the house.

“Adolph and Arnold are fighting again,” Victor’s mother said. Adolph and Arnold were her brothers, Victor’s uncles. They always fought. Had been fighting since the very beginning.

“Well, tell them to get their goddamn asses out of my house,” Victor’s father yelled again, his decibel level rising to meet the tension in the house.

“They already left,” Victor’s mother said. “They’re fighting out in the yard.”

Victor heard this and ran to his window. He could see his uncles slugging each other with such force that they had to be in love. Strangers would never want to hurt each other that badly. But it was strangely quiet, like Victor was watching a television show with the volume turned all the way down. He could hear the party upstairs move to the windows, step onto the front porch to watch the battle.

During other hurricanes broadcast on the news, Victor had seen crazy people tie themselves to trees on the beach. Those people wanted to feel the force of the hurricane firsthand, wanted it to be like an amusement ride, but the thin ropes were broken "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

and the people were broken. Sometimes the trees themselves were pulled from the ground and both the trees and the people tied to the trees were carried away.

Standing at his window, watching his uncles grow bloody and tired, Victor pulled the strings of his pajama bottoms tighter. He squeezed his hands into fists and pressed his face tightly against the glass.

“They’re going to kill each other,” somebody yelled from an upstairs window. Nobody disagreed and nobody moved to change the situation. Witnesses. They were all witnesses and nothing more. For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale. Victor’s uncles were in the midst of a misdemeanor that would remain one even if somebody was to die. One Indian killing another did not create a special kind of storm. This little kind of hurricane was generic. It didn’t even deserve a name.

Adolph soon had the best of Arnold, though, and was trying to drown him in the snow. Victor watched as his uncle held his other uncle down, saw the look of hate and love on his uncle’s face and the terrified arms of his other uncle flailing uselessly.

Then it was over. Adolph let Arnold loose, even pulled him to his feet, and

they both stood, facing each other. They started to yell again,

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unintelligible and unintelligent. The volume grew as other voices from the party upstairs were added. Victor could almost smell the sweat and whiskey and blood.

Everybody was assessing the damage, considering options. Would the fight continue? Would it decrease in intensity until both uncles sat quietly in opposite corners, exhausted and ashamed? Could the Indian Health Service doctors fix the broken nose and sprained ankles?

But there was other pain. Victor knew that. He stood at his window and touched his own body. His legs and back hurt from a day of sledding, his head was a little sore from where he bumped into a door earlier in the week. One molar ached from cavity; his chest throbbed with absence.

Victor had seen the news footage of cities after hurricanes had passed by. Houses were flattened, their contents thrown in every direction. Memories not destroyed, but forever changed and damaged. Which is worse? Victor wanted to know if memories of his personal hurricanes would be better if he could change them. Or if he just forgot about all of it. Victor had once seen a photograph of a car that a hurricane had picked up and carried for five miles before it fell onto a house. Victor remembered everything exactly that way.

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On Christmas Eve when he was five, Victor’s father wept because he didn’t have any money for gifts. Oh, there was a tree trimmed with ornaments, a few bulbs from the Trading Post, one string of lights, and photographs of the family with holes punched through the top, threaded with dental floss, and hung from tiny branches. But there were no gifts. Not one.

“But we’ve got each other,” Victor’s mother said, but she knew it was just dry recitation of the old Christmas movies they watched on television. It wasn’t real. Victor watched his father cry huge, gasping tears. Indian tears.

Victor imagined that his father’s tears could have frozen solid in the severe reservation winters and shattered when they hit the floor. Sent millions of icy knives through the air, each specific and beautiful. Each dangerous and random.

Victor imagined that he held an empty box beneath his father’s eyes and collected the tears, held that box until it was full. Victor would wrap it in Sunday comics and give it to his mother.

Just the week before, Victor had stood in the shadows of his father’s doorway and watched as the man opened his wallet and shook his head. Empty. Victor watched his father put the empty wallet back in his pocket for a moment, then pull it out and open it again. Still empty. Victor watched his father repeat this

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ceremony again and again, as if the repetition itself could guarantee change. But it was always empty.

During all these kinds of tiny storms, Victor’s mother would rise with her medicine and magic. She would pull air down from empty cupboards and make fry bread. She would shake thick blankets free from old bandanas. She would comb Victor’s braids into dreams.

In those dreams, Victor and his parents would be sitting in Mother’s Kitchen restaurant in Spokane, waiting out a storm. Rain and lightning. Unemployment and poverty. Commodity food. Flash floods.

“Soup,” Victor’s father would always say. “I want a bowl of soup.”

Mother’s Kitchen was always warm in those dreams. There was always a good song on the jukebox, a song that Victor didn’t really know but he knew it was good. And he knew it was a song from his parents’ youth. In those dreams, all was good.

Sometimes, though, the dream became a nightmare and Mother’s Kitchen was out of soup, the jukebox only played country music, and the roof leaked. Rain fell like drums into buckets and pots and pans set out to catch whatever they could. In those nightmares, Victor sat in his chair as rain fell, drop by drop, onto his head.

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In those nightmares, Victor felt his stomach ache with hunger. In fact, he felt his whole interior sway, nearly buckle, then fall. Gravity. Nothing for dinner except sleep. Gale and unsteady barometer.

In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor’s father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor’s father wasn’t shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point.

Some people liked the rain. But Victor hated it. Really hated it. The damp. Humidity. Low clouds and lies. Weathermen. When it was raining, Victor would apologize to everyone he talked to.

“Sorry about the weather,” he would say. Once, Victor’s cousins made him climb a tall tree during a

rainstorm. The bark was slick, nearly impossible to hold on to, but Victor kept climbing. The branches kept most of the rain off

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him, but there were always sudden funnels of water that broke through, startling enough to nearly make Victor lose his grip. Sudden rain like promises, like treaties. But Victor held on.

There was so much that Victor feared, so much his intense imagination created. For years, Victor feared that he was going to drown while it was raining, so that even when he thrashed through the lake and opened his mouth to scream, he would taste even more water falling from the sky. Sometimes he was sure that he would fall from the top of the slide or from a swing and a whirlpool would suddenly appear beneath him and carry him down into the earth, drown him at the core.

And of course, Victor dreamed of whiskey, vodka, tequila, those fluids swallowing him just as easily as he swallowed them. When he was five years old, an old Indian man drowned in a mud puddle at the powwow. Just passed out and fell facedown into the water collected in a tire track. Even at five, Victor understood what that meant, how it defined nearly everything. Fronts. Highs and lows. Thermals and undercurrents. Tragedy.

When the hurricane descended on the reservation in 1976, Victor was there to record it. If the video camera had been available then, Victor might have filmed it, but his memory was much more dependable.

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His uncles, Arnold and Adolph, gave up the fight and walked back into the house, into the New Year’s Eve party, arms linked, forgiving each other. But the storm that had caused their momentary anger had not died. Instead, it moved from Indian to Indian at the party, giving each a specific, painful memory.

Victor’s father remembered the time his own father was spit on as they waited for a bus in Spokane.

Victor’s mother remembered how the Indian Health Service doctor sterilized her moments after Victor was born.

Adolph and Arnold were touched by memories of previous battles, storms that continually haunted their lives. When children grow up together in poverty, a bond is formed that is stronger than most anything. It’s this same bond that causes so much pain. Adolph and Arnold reminded each other of their childhood, how they hid crackers in their shared bedroom so they would have something to eat.

“Did you hide the crackers?” Adolph asked his brother so many times that he still whispered that question in his sleep.

Other Indians at the party remembered their own pain. This pain grew, expanded. One person lost her temper when she accidentally brushed the skin of another. The forecast was not good. Indians continued to drink, harder and harder, as if anticipating. There’s a fifty percent chance of torrential rain,

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blizzardlike conditions, seismic activity. Then there’s a sixty percent chance, then seventy, eighty.

Victor was back in his bed, lying flat and still, watching the ceiling lower with each step above. The ceiling lowered with the weight of each Indian’s pain, until it was just inches from Victor’s nose. He wanted to scream, wanted to pretend it was just a nightmare or a game invented by his parents to help him sleep.

The voices upstairs continued to grow, take shape and fill space until Victor’s room, the entire house, was consumed by the party. Until Victor crawled from his bed and went to find his parents.

“Ya-hey, little nephew,” Adolph said as Victor stood alone in a corner.

“Hello, Uncle,” Victor said and gave Adolph a hug, gagged at his smell. Alcohol and sweat. Cigarettes and failure.

“Where’s my dad?” Victor asked. “Over there,” Adolph said and waved his arm in the general

direction of the kitchen. The house was not very large, but there were so many people and so much emotion filling the spaces between people that it was like a maze for little Victor. No matter which way he turned, he could not find his father or mother.

“Where are they?” he asked his aunt Nezzy.

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“Who?” she asked. “Mom and Dad,” Victor said, and Nezzy pointed toward the

bedroom. Victor made his way through the crowd, hated his tears. He didn’t hate the fear and pain that caused them. He expected that. What he hated was the way they felt against his cheeks, his chin, his skin as they made their way down his face. Victor cried until he found his parents, alone, passed out on their bed in the back bedroom.

Victor climbed up on the bed and lay down between them. His mother and father breathed deep, nearly choking alcoholic snores. They were sweating although the room was cold, and Victor thought the alcohol seeping through their skin might get him drunk, might help him sleep. He kissed his mother’s neck, tasted the salt and whiskey. He kissed his father’s forearm, tasted the cheap beer and smoke.

Victor closed his eyes tightly. He said his prayers just in case his parents had been wrong about God all those years. He listened for hours to every little hurricane spun from the larger hurricane that battered the reservation.

During that night, his aunt Nezzy broke her arm when an unidentified Indian woman pushed her down the stairs. Eugene Boyd broke a door playing indoor basketball. Lester FallsApart passed out on top of the stove and somebody turned the burners

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on high. James Many Horses sat in the corner and told so many bad jokes that three or four Indians threw him out the door into the snow.

“How do you get one hundred Indians to yell Oh, shit?” James Many Horses asked as he sat in a drift on the front lawn.

“Say Bingo,” James Many Horses answered himself when nobody from the party would.

James didn’t spend very much time alone in the snow. Soon Seymour and Lester were there, too. Seymour was thrown out because he kept flirting with all the women. Lester was there to cool off his burns. Soon everybody from the party was out on the lawn, dancing in the snow, fucking in the snow, fighting in the snow.

Victor lay between his parents, his alcoholic and dreamless parents, his mother and father. Victor licked his index finger and raised it into the air to test the wind. Velocity. Direction. Sleep approaching. The people outside seemed so far away, so strange and imaginary. There was a downshift of emotion, tension seemed to wane. Victor put one hand on his mother’s stomach and placed the other on his father’s. There was enough hunger in both, enough movement, enough geography and history, enough of everything to destroy the reservation and leave only random debris and broken furniture.

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But it was over. Victor closed his eyes, fell asleep. It was over. The hurricane that fell out of the sky in 1976 left before sunrise, and all the Indians, the eternal survivors, gathered to count their losses.

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A DRUG CALLED TRADITION

“GODDAMN IT, THOMAS,” JUNIOR yelled. “How come your fridge is always fucking empty?”

Thomas walked over to the refrigerator, saw it was empty, and then sat down inside.

“There,” Thomas said. “It ain’t empty no more.” Everybody in the kitchen laughed their asses off. It was the

second-largest party in reservation history and Thomas Builds- the-Fire was the host. He was the host because he was the one buying all the beer. And he was buying all the beer because he had just got a ton of money from Washington Water Power. And he just got a ton of money from Washington Water Power because they had to pay for the lease to have ten power poles running across some land that Thomas had inherited.

When Indians make lots of money from corporations that way, we can all hear our ancestors laughing in the trees. But we never can tell whether they’re laughing at the Indians or the whites. I think they’re laughing at pretty much everybody.

“Hey, Victor,” Junior said. “I hear you got some magic mushrooms.” "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

“No way,” I said. “Just Green Giant mushrooms. I’m making salad later.”

But I did have this brand new drug and had planned on inviting Junior along. Maybe a couple Indian princesses, too. But only if they were full-blood. Well, maybe if they were at least half-Spokane.

“Listen,” I whispered to Junior to keep it secret. “I’ve got some good stuff, a new drug, but just enough for me and you and maybe a couple others. Keep it under your warbonnet.”

“Cool,” Junior said. “I’ve got my new car outside. Let’s go.”

We ditched the party, decided to save the new drug for ourselves, and jumped into Junior’s Camaro. The engine was completely shot but the exterior was good. You see, the car looked mean. Mostly we just parked it in front of the Trading Post and tried to look like horsepowered warriors. Driving it was a whole other matter, though. It belched and farted its way down the road like an old man. That definitely wasn’t cool.

“Where do you want to go?” Junior asked. “Benjamin Lake,” I said, and we took off in a cloud of oil

and exhaust. We drove down the road a little toward Benjamin Lake when we saw Thomas Builds-the-Fire standing by the side of the road. Junior stopped the car and I leaned out the window. "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

“Hey, Thomas,” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be at your own party?”

“You guys know it ain’t my party anyway,” Thomas said. “I just paid for it.”

We laughed. I looked at Junior and he nodded his head. “Hey,” I said. “Jump in with us. We’re going out to

Benjamin Lake to do this new drug I got. It’ll be very fucking Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?”

Thomas climbed in back and was just about ready to tell another one of his goddamn stories when I stopped him.

“Now, listen,” I said. “You can only come with us if you don’t tell any of your stories until after you’ve taken the drug.”

Thomas thought that over awhile. He nodded his head in the affirmative and we drove on. He looked so happy to be spending the time with us that I gave him the new drug.

“Eat up, Thomas,” I said. “The party’s on me now.” Thomas downed it and smiled. “Tell us what you see, Mr. Builds-the-Fire,” Junior said. Thomas looked around the car. Hell, he looked around our

world and then poked his head through some hole in the wall into another world. A better world.

“Victor,” Thomas said. “I can see you. God, you’re beautiful. You’ve got braids and you’re stealing a horse. Wait,

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no. It’s not a horse. It’s a cow.” Junior almost wrecked because he laughed so hard. “Why the fuck would I be stealing a cow?” I asked. “I’m just giving you shit,” Thomas said. “No, really, you’re

stealing a horse and you’re riding by moonlight. Van Gogh should’ve painted this one, Victor. Van Gogh should’ve painted you.”

It was a cold, cold night. I had crawled through the brush for hours, moved by inches so the Others would not hear me. I wanted one of their ponies. I needed one of their ponies. I needed to be a hero and earn my name.

I crawl close enough to their camp to hear voices, to hear an old man sucking the last bit of meat off a bone. I can see the pony I want. He is black, twenty hands high. I can feel him shiver because he knows I have come for him in the middle of this cold night.

Crawling more quickly now, I make my way to the corral, right between the legs of a young boy asleep on his feet. He was supposed to keep watch for men like me. I barely touch his bare leg and he swipes at it, thinking it is a mosquito. If I stood and kissed the young boy full on the mouth, he would only think he was dreaming of the girl who smiled at him earlier in the day.

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When I finally come close to the beautiful black pony, I stand up straight and touch his nose, his mane.

I have come for you, I tell the horse, and he moves against me, knows it is true. I mount him and ride silently through the camp, right in front of a blind man who smells us pass by and thinks we are just a pleasant memory. When he finds out the next day who we really were, he will remain haunted and crowded the rest of his life.

I am riding that pony across the open plain, in moonlight that makes everything a shadow.

What’s your name? I ask the horse, and he rears back on his hind legs. He pulls air deep into his lungs and rises above the ground.

Flight, he tells me, my name is Flight.

“That’s what I see,” Thomas said. “I see you on that horse.” Junior looked at Thomas in the rearview mirror, looked at

me, looked at the road in front of him. “Victor,” Junior said. “Give me some of that stuff.” “But you’re driving,” I said. “That’ll make it even better,” he said, and I had to agree

with him. “Tell us what you see,” Thomas said and leaned forward.

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“Nothing yet,” Junior said. “Am I still on that horse?” I asked Thomas. “Oh, yeah.” We came up on the turnoff to Benjamin Lake, and Junior

made it into a screaming corner. Just another Indian boy engaged in some rough play.

“Oh, shit,” Junior said. “I can see Thomas dancing.” “I don’t dance,” Thomas said. “You’re dancing and you ain’t wearing nothing. You’re

dancing naked around a fire.” “No, I’m not.” “Shit, you’re not. I can see you, you’re tall and dark and

fucking huge, cousin.”

They’re all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I’m the last, the very last, and I’m sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot.

I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash the water across my bare skin. And dance. I’ll dance a Ghost Dance. I’ll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it’s my grandfather and my grandmother singing. Can you hear them?

I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance

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another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls.

I’m growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.

We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.

“Junior,” I yelled. “Slow down, slow down.” Junior had the car spinning in circles, doing donuts across empty fields, coming too close to fences and lonely trees.

“Thomas,” Junior yelled. “You’re dancing, dancing hard.” I leaned over and slammed on the brakes. Junior jumped out

of the car and ran across the field. I turned the car off and followed him. We’d gotten about a mile down the road toward

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Benjamin Lake when Thomas came driving by. “Stop the car,” I yelled, and Thomas did just that. “Where were you going?” I asked him. “I was chasing you and your horse, cousin.” “Jesus, this shit is powerful,” I said and swallowed some.

Instantly I saw and heard Junior singing. He stood on a stage in a ribbon shirt and blue jeans. Singing. With a guitar.

Indians make the best cowboys. I can tell you that. I’ve been singing at the Plantation since I was ten years old and have always drawn big crowds. All the white folks come to hear my songs, my little pieces of Indian wisdom, although they have to sit in the back of the theater because all the Indians get the best tickets for my shows. It’s not racism. The Indians just camp out all night to buy tickets. Even the President of the United States, Mr. Edgar Crazy Horse himself, came to hear me once. I played a song I wrote for his great-grandfather, the famous Lakota warrior who helped us win the war against the whites:

Crazy Horse, what have you done? Crazy Horse, what have you done? It took four hundred years and four hundred thousand guns but the Indians finally won.

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Ya-hey, the Indians finally won.

Crazy Horse, are you still singing? Crazy Horse, are you still singing? I honor your old songs and all they keep on bringing because the Indians keep winning. Ya-hey, the Indians keep winning.

Believe me, I’m the best guitar player who ever lived. I can make my guitar sound like a drum. More than that, I can make any drum sound like a guitar. I can take a single hair from the braids of an Indian woman and make it sound like a promise come true. Like a thousand promises come true.

“Junior,” I asked. “Where’d you learn to sing?” “I don’t know how to sing,” he said. We made our way down the road to Benjamin Lake and

stood by the water. Thomas sat on the dock with his feet in the water and laughed softly. Junior sat on the hood of his car, and I danced around them both.

After a little bit, I tired out and sat on the hood of the car with Junior. The drug was beginning to wear off. All I could see in my vision of Junior was his guitar. Junior pulled out a can of

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warm Diet Pepsi and we passed it back and forth and watched Thomas talking to himself.

“He’s telling himself stories,” Junior said. “Well,” I said. “Ain’t nobody else going to listen.” “Why’s he like that?” Junior asked. “Why’s he always

talking about strange shit? Hell, he don’t even need drugs.” “Some people say he got dropped on his head when he was

little. Some of the old people think he’s magic.” “What do you think?” “I think he got dropped on his head and I think he’s magic.” We laughed, and Thomas looked up from the water, from

his stories, and smiled at us. “Hey,” he said. “You two want to hear a story?” Junior and I looked at each other, looked back at Thomas,

and decided that it would be all right. Thomas closed his eyes and told his story.

It is now. Three Indian boys are drinking Diet Pepsi and talking out by Benjamin Lake. They are wearing only loincloths and braids. Although it is the twentieth century and planes are passing overhead, the Indian boys have decided to be real Indians tonight.

They all want to have their vision, to receive their true

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names, their adult names. That is the problem with Indians these days. They have the same names all their lives. Indians wear their names like a pair of bad shoes.

So they decided to build a fire and breathe in that sweet smoke. They have not eaten for days so they know their visions should arrive soon. Maybe they’ll see it in the flames or in the wood. Maybe the smoke will talk in Spokane or English. Maybe the cinders and ash will rise up.

The boys sit by the fire and breathe, their visions arrive. They are all carried away to the past, to the moment before any of them took their first drink of alcohol.

The boy Thomas throws the beer he is offered into the garbage. The boy Junior throws his whiskey through a window. The boy Victor spills his vodka down the drain.

Then the boys sing. They sing and dance and drum. They steal horses. I can see them. They steal horses.

“You don’t really believe that shit?” I asked Thomas. “Don’t need to believe anything. It just is.” Thomas stood up and walked away. He wouldn’t even try to

tell us any stories again for a few years. We had never been very good to him, even as boys, but he had always been kind to us. When he stopped even looking at me, I was hurt. How do you

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explain that? Before he left for good, though, he turned back to Junior and

me and yelled at us. I couldn’t really understand what he was saying, but Junior swore he told us not to slow dance with our skeletons.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Junior said.

There are things you should learn . Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.

What you have to do is keep moving, keep walking, in step with your skeletons. They ain’t ever going to leave you, so you don’t have to worry about that. Your past ain’t going to fall behind, and your future won’t get too far ahead. Sometimes, though, your skeletons will talk to you, tell you to sit down and take a rest, breathe a little. Maybe they’ll make you promises, tell you all the things you want to hear.

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Sometimes your skeletons will dress up as beautiful Indian women and ask you to slow dance. Sometimes your skeletons will dress up as your best friend and offer you a drink, one more for the road. Sometimes your skeletons will look exactly like your parents and offer you gifts.

But, no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving. And don’t wear a watch. Hell, Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now.

Junior and I sat out by Benjamin Lake until dawn. We heard voices now and again, saw lights in the trees. After I saw my grandmother walking across the water toward me, I threw away the rest of my new drug and hid in the backseat of Junior’s car.

Later that day we were parked in front of the Trading Post, gossiping and laughing, talking stories when Big Mom walked up to the car. Big Mom was the spiritual leader of the Spokane Tribe. She had so much good medicine I think she may have been the one who created the earth.

“I know what you saw,” Big Mom said. “We didn’t see nothing,” I said, but we all knew that I was

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lying. Big Mom smiled at me, shook her head a little, and handed

me a little drum. It looked like it was about a hundred years old, maybe older. It was so small it could fit in the palm of my hand.

“You keep that,” she said. “Just in case.” “Just in case of what?” I asked. “That’s my pager. Just give it a tap and I’ll be right over,”

she said and laughed as she walked away. Now, I’ll tell you that I haven’t used the thing. In fact, Big

Mom died a couple years back and I’m not sure she’d come even if the thing did work. But I keep it really close to me, like Big Mom said, just in case. I guess you could call it the only religion I have, one drum that can fit in my hand, but I think if I played it a little, it might fill up the whole world.

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BECAUSE MY FATHER ALWAYS SAID HE WAS THE ONLY INDIAN WHO SAW JIMI HENDRIX PLAY “THE STAR-SPANGLED

BANNER” AT WOODSTOCK

DURING THE SIXTIES, MY father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians. Because of that, how could anyone recognize that my father was trying to make a social statement?

But there is evidence, a photograph of my father demonstrating in Spokane, Washington, during the Vietnam War. The photograph made it onto the wire service and was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country. In fact, it was on the cover of Time.

In the photograph, my father is dressed in bell-bottoms and flowered shirt, his hair in braids, with red peace symbols "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

splashed across his face like war paint. In his hands my father holds a rifle above his head, captured in that moment just before he proceeded to beat the shit out of the National Guard private lying prone on the ground. A fellow demonstrator holds a sign that is just barely visible over my father’s left shoulder. It read MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.

The photographer won a Pulitzer Prize, and editors across the country had a lot of fun creating captions and headlines. I’ve read many of them collected in my father’s scrapbook, and my favorite was run in the Seattle Times. The caption under the photograph read DEMONSTRATOR GOES TO WAR FOR PEACE . The editors capitalized on my father’s Native American identity with other headlines like ONE WARRIOR AGAINST WAR and PEACEFUL GATHERING TURNS INTO NATIVE UPRISING.

Anyway, my father was arrested, charged with attempted murder, which was reduced to assault with a deadly weapon. It was a high-profile case so my father was used as an example. Convicted and sentenced quickly, he spent two years in Walla Walla State Penitentiary. Although his prison sentence effectively kept him out of the war, my father went through a different kind of war behind bars.

“There was Indian gangs and white gangs and black gangs and Mexican gangs,” he told me once. “And there was somebody "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

new killed every day. We’d hear about somebody getting it in the shower or wherever and the word would go down the line. Just one word. Just the color of his skin. Red, white, black, or brown. Then we’d chalk it up on the mental scoreboard and wait for the next broadcast.”

My father made it through all that, never got into any serious trouble, somehow avoided rape, and got out of prison just in time to hitchhike to Woodstock to watch Jimi Hendrix play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“After all the shit I’d been through,” my father said, “I figured Jimi must have known I was there in the crowd to play something like that. It was exactly how I felt.”

Twenty years later, my father played his Jimi Hendrix tape until it wore down. Over and over, the house filled with the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air. He’d sit by the stereo with a cooler of beer beside him and cry, laugh, call me over and hold me tight in his arms, his bad breath and body odor covering me like a blanket.

Jimi Hendrix and my father became drinking buddies. Jimi Hendrix waited for my father to come home after a long night of drinking. Here’s how the ceremony worked:

1. I would lie awake all night and listen for the sounds

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of my father’s pickup. 2. When I heard my father’s pickup, I would run

upstairs and throw Jimi’s tape into the stereo. 3. Jimi would bend his guitar into the first note of “The

Star-Spangled Banner” just as my father walked inside. 4. My father would weep, attempt to hum along with

Jimi, and then pass out with his head on the kitchen table. 5. I would fall asleep under the table with my head near

my father’s feet. 6. We’d dream together until the sun came up.

The days after, my father would feel so guilty that he would tell me stories as a means of apology.

“I met your mother at a party in Spokane,” my father told me once. “We were the only two Indians at the party. Maybe the only two Indians in the whole town. I thought she was so beautiful. I figured she was the kind of woman who could make buffalo walk on up to her and give up their lives. She wouldn’t have needed to hunt. Every time we went walking, birds would follow us around. Hell, tumbleweeds would follow us around.”

Somehow my father’s memories of my mother grew more beautiful as their relationship became more hostile. By the time the divorce was final, my mother was quite possibly the most

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beautiful woman who ever lived. “Your father was always half crazy,” my mother told me

more than once. “And the other half was on medication.” But she loved him, too, with a ferocity that eventually

forced her to leave him. They fought each other with the kind of graceful anger that only love can create. Still, their love was passionate, unpredictable, and selfish. My mother and father would get drunk and leave parties abruptly to go home and make love.

“Don’t tell your father I told you this,” my mother said. “But there must have been a hundred times he passed out on top of me. We’d be right in the middle of it, he’d say I love you, his eyes would roll backwards, and then out went his lights. It sounds strange, I know, but those were good times.”

I was conceived during one of those drunken nights, half of me formed by my father’s whiskey sperm, the other half formed by my mother’s vodka egg. I was born a goofy reservation mixed drink, and my father needed me just as much as he needed every other kind of drink.

One night my father and I were driving home in a near- blizzard after a basketball game, listening to the radio. We didn’t talk much. One, because my father didn’t talk much when he was sober, and two, because Indians don’t need to talk to

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communicate. “Hello out there, folks, this is Big Bill Baggins, with the

late-night classics show on KROC, 97.2 on your FM dial. We have a request from Betty in Tekoa. She wants to hear Jimi Hendrix’s version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ recorded live at Woodstock.”

My father smiled, turned the volume up, and we rode down the highway while Jimi led the way like a snowplow. Until that night, I’d always been neutral about Jimi Hendrix. But, in that near-blizzard with my father at the wheel, with the nervous silence caused by the dangerous roads and Jimi’s guitar, there seemed to be more to all that music. The reverberation came to mean something, took form and function.

That song made me want to learn to play guitar, not because I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix and not because I thought I’d ever play for anyone. I just wanted to touch the strings, to hold the guitar tight against my body, invent a chord, and come closer to what Jimi knew, to what my father knew.

“You know,” I said to my father after the song was over, “my generation of Indian boys ain’t ever had no real war to fight. The first Indians had Custer to fight. My great-grandfather had World War I, my grandfather had World War II, you had Vietnam. All I have is video games.”

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My father laughed for a long time, nearly drove off the road into the snowy fields.

“Shit,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you ain’t had to fight a war. You’re lucky. Shit, all you had was that damn Desert Storm. Should have called it Dessert Storm because it just made the fat cats get fatter. It was all sugar and whipped cream with a cherry on top. And besides that, you didn’t even have to fight it. All you lost during that war was sleep because you stayed up all night watching CNN.”

We kept driving through the snow, talked about war and peace.

“That’s all there is,” my father said. “War and peace with nothing in between. It’s always one or the other.”

“You sound like a book,” I said. “Yeah, well, that’s how it is. Just because it’s in a book

doesn’t make it not true. And besides, why the hell would you want to fight a war for this country? It’s been trying to kill Indians since the very beginning. Indians are pretty much born soldiers anyway. Don’t need a uniform to prove it.”

Those were the kinds of conversations that Jimi Hendrix forced us to have. I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he’s been dead for years,

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so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is. Music turned my father into a reservation philosopher. Music had powerful medicine.

“I remember the first time your mother and I danced,” my father told me once. “We were in this cowboy bar. We were the only real cowboys there despite the fact that we’re Indians. We danced to a Hank Williams song. Danced to that real sad one, you know. ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.’ Except your mother and I weren’t lonesome or crying. We just shuffled along and fell right goddamn down into love.”

“Hank Williams and Jimi Hendrix don’t have much in common,” I said.

“Hell, yes, they do. They knew all about broken hearts,” my father said.

“You sound like a bad movie.” “Yeah, well, that’s how it is. You kids today don’t know shit

about romance. Don’t know shit about music either. Especially you Indian kids. You all have been spoiled by those drums. Been hearing them beat so long, you think that’s all you need. Hell, son, even an Indian needs a piano or guitar or saxophone now and again.”

My father played in a band in high school. He was the drummer. I guess he’d burned out on those. Now, he was like the

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universal defender of the guitar. “I remember when your father would haul that old guitar

out and play me songs,” my mother said. “He couldn’t play all that well but he tried. You could see him thinking about what chord he was going to play next. His eyes got all squeezed up and his face turned all red. He kind of looked that way when he kissed me, too. But don’t tell him I said that.”

Some nights I lay awake and listened to my parents’ lovemaking. I know white people keep it quiet, pretend they don’t ever make love. My white friends tell me they can’t even imagine their own parents getting it on. I know exactly what it sounds like when my parents are touching each other. It makes up for knowing exactly what they sound like when they’re fighting. Plus and minus. Add and subtract. It comes out just about even.

Some nights I would fall asleep to the sounds of my parents’ lovemaking. I would dream Jimi Hendrix. I could see my father standing in the front row in the dark at Woodstock as Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My mother was at home with me, both of us waiting for my father to find his way back home to the reservation. It’s amazing to realize I was alive, breathing and wetting my bed, when Jimi was alive and breaking guitars.

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I dreamed my father dancing with all these skinny hippie women, smoking a few joints, dropping acid, laughing when the rain fell. And it did rain there. I’ve seen actual news footage. I’ve seen the documentaries. It rained. People had to share food. People got sick. People got married. People cried all kinds of tears.

But as much as I dream about it, I don’t have any clue about what it meant for my father to be the only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix play at Woodstock. And maybe he wasn’t the only Indian there. Most likely there were hundreds but my father thought he was the only one. He told me that a million times when he was drunk and a couple hundred times when he was sober.

“I was there,” he said. “You got to remember this was near the end and there weren’t as many people as before. Not nearly as many. But I waited it out. I waited for Jimi.”

A few years back, my father packed up the family and the three of us drove to Seattle to visit Jimi Hendrix’s grave. We had our photograph taken lying down next to the grave. There isn’t a gravestone there. Just one of those flat markers.

Jimi was twenty-eight when he died. That’s younger than Jesus Christ when he died. Younger than my father as we stood over the grave.

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“Only the good die young,” my father said. “No,” my mother said. “Only the crazy people choke to

death on their own vomit.” “Why you talking about my hero that way?” my father

asked. “Shit,” my mother said. “Old Jesse WildShoe choked to

death on his own vomit and he ain’t anybody’s hero.” I stood back and watched my parents argue. I was used to

these battles. When an Indian marriage starts to fall apart, it’s even more destructive and painful than usual. A hundred years ago, an Indian marriage was broken easily. The woman or man just packed up all their possessions and left the tipi. There were no arguments, no discussions. Now, Indians fight their way to the end, holding onto the last good thing, because our whole lives have to do with survival.

After a while, after too much fighting and too many angry words had been exchanged, my father went out and bought a motorcycle. A big bike. He left the house often to ride that thing for hours, sometimes for days. He even strapped an old cassette player to the gas tank so he could listen to music. With that bike, he learned something new about running away. He stopped talking as much, stopped drinking as much. He didn’t do much of anything except ride that bike and listen to music.

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Then one night my father wrecked his bike on Devil’s Gap Road and ended up in the hospital for two months. He broke both his legs, cracked his ribs, and punctured a lung. He also lacerated his kidney. The doctors said he could have died easily. In fact, they were surprised he made it through surgery, let alone survived those first few hours when he lay on the road, bleeding. But I wasn’t surprised. That’s how my father was.

And even though my mother didn’t want to be married to him anymore and his wreck didn’t change her mind about that, she still came to see him every day. She sang Indian tunes under her breath, in time with the hum of the machines hooked into my father. Although my father could barely move, he tapped his finger in rhythm.

When he had the strength to finally sit up and talk, hold conversations, and tell stories, he called for me.

“Victor,” he said. “Stick with four wheels.” After he began to recover, my mother stopped visiting as

often. She helped him through the worst, though. When he didn’t need her anymore, she went back to the life she had created. She traveled to powwows, started to dance again. She was a champion traditional dancer when she was younger.

“I remember your mother when she was the best traditional dancer in the world,” my father said. “Everyone wanted to call

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her sweetheart. But she only danced for me. That’s how it was. She told me that every other step was just for me.”

“But that’s only half of the dance,” I said. “Yeah,” my father said. “She was keeping the rest for

herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain’t healthy.” “You know,” I said, “sometimes you sound like you ain’t

even real.” “What’s real? I ain’t interested in what’s real. I’m

interested in how things should be.” My father’s mind always worked that way. If you don’t like

the things you remember, then all you have to do is change the memories. Instead of remembering the bad things, remember what happened immediately before. That’s what I learned from my father. For me, I remember how good the first drink of that Diet Pepsi tasted instead of how my mouth felt when I swallowed a wasp with the second drink.

Because of all that, my father always remembered the second before my mother left him for good and took me with her. No. I remembered the second before my father left my mother and me. No. My mother remembered the second before my father left her to finish raising me all by herself.

But however memory actually worked, it was my father who climbed on his motorcycle, waved to me as I stood in the

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window, and rode away. He lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, before he finally ended up in Phoenix. For a while, I got postcards nearly every week. Then it was once a month. Then it was on Christmas and my birthday.

On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation can work.

My mother did her best to explain it all to me, although I understood most of what happened.

“Was it because of Jimi Hendrix?” I asked her. “Part of it, yeah,” she said. “This might be the only

marriage broken up by a dead guitar player.” “There’s a first time for everything, enit?” “I guess. Your father just likes being alone more than he

likes being with other people. Even me and you.” Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo

albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She’d get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt.

On those nights I missed him most I listened to music. Not always Jimi Hendrix. Usually I listened to the blues. Robert

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Johnson mostly. The first time I heard Robert Johnson sing I knew he understood what it meant to be Indian on the edge of the twenty-first century, even if he was black at the beginning of the twentieth. That must have been how my father felt when he heard Jimi Hendrix. When he stood there in the rain at Woodstock.

Then on the night I missed my father most, when I lay in bed and cried, with that photograph of him beating that National Guard private in my hands, I imagined his motorcycle pulling up outside. I knew I was dreaming it all but I let it be real for a moment.

“Victor,” my father yelled. “Let’s go for a ride.” “I’ll be right down. I need to get my coat on.” I rushed around the house, pulled my shoes and socks on,

struggled into my coat, and ran outside to find an empty driveway. It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away. I stood on the porch and waited until my mother came outside.

“Come on back inside,” she said. “It’s cold.” “No,” I said. “I know he’s coming back tonight.” My mother didn’t say anything. She just wrapped me in her

favorite quilt and went back to sleep. I stood on the porch all night long and imagined I heard motorcycles and guitars, until

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the sun rose so bright that I knew it was time to go back inside to my mother. She made breakfast for both of us and we ate until we were full.

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CRAZY HORSE DREAMS SHE TRIED TO STAND close to Victor at the fry bread stand, but he moved from open space to open space, between the other Indians eating and drinking, while he hoped the Blackfoot waitress would finally take his order. When he grew tired of the chase, he turned to leave and she was standing there.

“They don’t pay you any mind because your hair is too short,” she said.

She’s too short to be this honest, he thought. Her braids reach down to her waist, but on a tall woman they would be simple, insignificant. She’s wearing a fifty-dollar ribbon shirt manufactured by a company in Spokane. He’d read about the Indian grandmother who designs them, each an original, before she sells them for a standard operating fee. He remembered the redheaded bank teller who cashed his check and asked him if he thought her shirt was authentic. Authentic. He stared at this small Indian woman standing in his way and walked past her.

“Hey, One-Braid,” she called after him. “Too good for me?” “No,” he said. “Too big.” He walked away, through the sawchips spread over the

ground to keep the dust down, down to the stickgame pavilion.

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He was surprised to see Willie Boyd holding the bones, making gas money for the ride to the next powwow. He dug into his pockets, found a five-dollar bill, and threw it in with Willie. Willie shifted the bones from hand to hand, a Native magician working without mirrors, his hand an inch quicker than the eyes of the old woman sitting on the other side, trying to find the bone with the colored band. The old woman laughed when she guessed wrong, threw a few crumpled bills into the dirt in front of Willie.

“Let it ride all night, Willie,” Victor said. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

It was only the first night of the powwow, everyone had money in their pockets. A five-dollar bill couldn’t mean a thing until the end, when the last van heading out of Browning or Poplar had room for only one more. Willie Boyd drove an RV with a television and a refrigerator, with a sunroof that took in all the air. When it mattered, Victor thought, Willie Boyd would remember that five dollars. Willie Boyd always remembered.

She was standing behind him, again, when he turned to leave.

“You must be a rich man,” she said. “Not much of a warrior, though. You keep letting me sneak up on you.”

“You don’t surprise me,” he said. “The Plains Indians had women who rode their horses eighteen hours a day. They could

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shoot seven arrows consecutively, have them all in the air at the same time. They were the best light cavalry in the history of the world.”

“Just my luck,” she said. “An educated Indian.” “Yeah,” he said. “Reservation University.” They both laughed at the old joke. Every Indian is an

alumnus. “Where you from?” she asked. “Wellpinit,” he said. “I’m a Spokane.” “I should’ve known. You got those fisherman’s hands.” “Ain’t no salmon left in our river. Just a school bus and a

few hundred basketballs.” “What the hell you talking about?” “Our basketball team drives into the river and drowns every

year,” he said. “It’s tradition.” She laughed. “You’re just a storyteller, ain’t you?” “I’m just telling you things before they happen,” he said.

“The same things sons and daughters will tell your mothers and fathers.”

“Do you ever answer a question straight?” “Depends on the question,” he said. “Do you want to be my powwow paradise?” She took him back to her Winnebago. In the dark, on the

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plastic mattress, she touched his soft belly. His hands moved over her, fancydancers, each going farther away from his body. He was shaking.

“What are you scared of?” she asked. “Elevators, escalators, revolving doors. Any kind of forced

movement.” “You don’t have to worry about those kind of things at a

powwow.” “That’s not true,” he said. “We had an Indian conference at

the Sheraton Hotel in Spokane last winter. About twenty of us crowded into an elevator to go up to my room and we got stuck between the twelfth and fourteenth floors. Twenty Indians and a little old white elevator man having a heart attack.”

“You’re lying,” she said. “You stole that story.” “What scares you?” he asked. She was quiet. She stared

hard at him, trying to find his features among the shadows, formed a picture of him in her mind. But she was wrong. His hair was thinner, more brown than black. His hands were small. Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse.

“I have this dream about playing bingo,” she said. “It’s a million-dollar blackout and I only need B-6. But the caller announces B-7 and everyone else in the whole damn place is yelling out, Bingo!”

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“Sounds more like the truth to me,” he said as she reached across him and turned on the light.

Victor was surprised. She had grown. She was the most enormous woman he had ever seen. Her hair fell down over her body, an explosion of horses. She was more beautiful than he wanted, more of a child of freeway exits and cable television, a mother to the children who waited outside 7-11 asking him to buy them a case of Coors Light. She sat on the bus traveling uptown to a community college. She sat on the bus traveling toward cities that grew, doubled. There was nothing he could give her father to earn her hand, nothing she would understand, remember.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, reaching for the light again, but he stopped her, held her wrist tightly, painfully.

“Why don’t you have any scars?” he asked, pulling her face close to his, her braids touching his chest.

“Why do you have so fucking many?” she asked him. Then she was afraid of the man naked beside her, under her,

afraid of that man who was simple in clothes and cowboy boots, a feather in a bottle.

“You’re nothing important,” he said. “You’re just another goddamned Indian like me.”

“Wrong,” she said, twisting from his grip and sitting up, her

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arms crossed over her chest. “I’m the best kind of Indian and I’m in bed with my father.”

He laughed. She was silent. She thought she could be saved. She thought he could take her hand and owldance her around the circle. She thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect with each step. She thought he was Crazy Horse.

He got up, pulled on his Levi’s, buttoned his red-and-black flannel shirt, the kind some writer called an Indian shirt. He stepped into his cowboy boots, opened the tiny refrigerator, and grabbed a beer.

“You’re nothing. You’re nothing,” he said and left. Standing in the dark, next to a tipi with blue smoke escaping

from the fire inside, he watched the Winnebago. For hours, Victor watched the lights go on and off, on and off. He wished he was Crazy Horse.

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THE ONLY TRAFFIC SIGNAL ON THE

RESERVATION DOESN’T FLASH RED ANYMORE

“GO AHEAD,” ADRIAN SAID. “Pull the trigger.” I held a pistol to my temple. I was sober but wished I was

drunk enough to pull the trigger. “Go for it,” Adrian said. “You chickenshit.” While I still held that pistol to my temple, I used my other

hand to flip Adrian off. Then I made a fist with my third hand to gather a little bit of courage or stupidity, and wiped sweat from my forehead with my fourth hand.

“Here,” Adrian said. “Give me the damn thing.” Adrian took the pistol, put the barrel in his mouth, smiled around the metal, and pulled the trigger. Then he cussed wildly, laughed, and spit out the BB.

“Are you dead yet?” I asked. “Nope,” he said. “Not yet. Give me another beer.” “Hey, we don’t drink no more, remember? How about a Diet

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Pepsi?” “That’s right, enit? I forgot. Give me a Pepsi.” Adrian and I sat on the porch and watched the reservation.

Nothing happened. From our chairs made rockers by unsteady legs, we could see that the only traffic signal on the reservation had stopped working.

“Hey, Victor,” Adrian asked. “Now when did that thing quit flashing?”

“Don’t know,” I said. It was summer. Hot. But we kept our shirts on to hide our

beer bellies and chicken-pox scars. At least, I wanted to hide my beer belly. I was a former basketball star fallen out of shape. It’s always kind of sad when that happens. There’s nothing more unattractive than a vain man, and that goes double for an Indian man.

“So,” Adrian asked. “What you want to do today?” “Don’t know.” We watched a group of Indian boys walk by. I’d like to

think there were ten of them. But there were actually only four or five. They were skinny, darkened by sun, their hair long and wild. None of them looked like they had showered for a week.

Their smell made me jealous. They were off to cause trouble somewhere, I’m sure. Little

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warriors looking for honor in some twentieth-century vandalism. Throw a few rocks through windows, kick a dog, slash a tire. Run like hell when the tribal cops drove slowly by the scene of the crime.

“Hey,” Adrian asked. “Isn’t that the Windmaker boy?” “Yeah,” I said and watched Adrian lean forward to study

Julius Windmaker, the best basketball player on the reservation, even though he was only fifteen years old.

“He looks good,” Adrian said. “Yeah, he must not be drinking.” “Yet.” “Yeah, yet.” Julius Windmaker was the latest in a long line of

reservation basketball heroes, going all the way back to Aristotle Polatkin, who was shooting jumpshots exactly one year before James Naismith supposedly invented basketball.

I’d only seen Julius play a few times, but he had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddamn medicine man. One time, when the tribal school traveled to Spokane to play this white high school team, Julius scored sixty-seven points and the Indians won by forty.

“I didn’t know they’d be riding horses,” I heard the coach of the white team say when I was leaving.

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I mean, Julius was an artist, moody. A couple times he walked right off the court during the middle of a game because there wasn’t enough competition. That’s how he was. Julius could throw a crazy pass, surprise us all, and send it out of bounds. But nobody called it a turnover because we all knew that one of his teammates should’ve been there to catch the pass. We loved him.

“Hey, Julius,” Adrian yelled from the porch. “You ain’t shit.”

Julius and his friends laughed, flipped us off, and shook their tail feathers a little as they kept walking down the road. They all knew Julius was the best ballplayer on the reservation these days, maybe the best ever, and they knew Adrian was just confirming that fact.

It was easier for Adrian to tease Julius because he never really played basketball. He was more detached about the whole thing. But I used to be quite a ballplayer. Maybe not as good as some, certainly not as good as Julius, but I still felt that ache in my bones, that need to be better than everyone else. It’s that need to be the best, that feeling of immortality, that drives a ballplayer. And when it disappears, for whatever reason, that ballplayer is never the same person, on or off the court.

I know when I lost it, that edge. During my senior year in

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high school we made it to the state finals. I’d been playing like crazy, hitting everything. It was like throwing rocks into the ocean from a little rowboat. I couldn’t miss. Then, right before the championship game, we had our pregame meeting in the first-aid room of the college where the tournament was held every year.

It took a while for our coach to show up so we spent the time looking at these first-aid manuals. These books had all kinds of horrible injuries. Hands and feet smashed flat in printing presses, torn apart by lawnmowers, burned and dismembered. Faces that had gone through windshields, dragged over gravel, split open by garden tools. The stuff was disgusting, but we kept looking, flipping through photograph after photograph, trading books, until we all wanted to throw up.

While I looked at those close-ups of death and destruction, I lost it. I think everybody in that room, everybody on the team, lost that feeling of immortality. We went out and lost the championship game by twenty points. I missed every shot I took. I missed everything.

“So,” I asked Adrian. “You think Julius will make it all the way?”

“Maybe, maybe.” There’s a definite history of reservation heroes who never

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finish high school, who never finish basketball seasons. Hell, there’s been one or two guys who played just a few minutes of one game, just enough to show what they could have been. And there’s the famous case of Silas Sirius, who made one move and scored one basket in his entire basketball career. People still talk about it.

“Hey,” I asked Adrian. “Remember Silas Sirius?” “Hell,” Adrian said. “Do I remember? I was there when he

grabbed that defensive rebound, took a step, and flew the length of the court, did a full spin in midair, and then dunked that fucking ball. And I don’t mean it looked like he flew, or it was so beautiful it was almost like he flew. I mean, he flew, period.”

I laughed, slapped my legs, and knew that I believed Adrian’s story more as it sounded less true.

“Shit,” he continued. “And he didn’t grow no wings. He just kicked his legs a little. Held that ball like a baby in his hand. And he was smiling. Really. Smiling when he flew. Smiling when he dunked it, smiling when he walked off the court and never came back. Hell, he was still smiling ten years after that.”

I laughed some more, quit for a second, then laughed a little longer because it was the right thing to do.

“Yeah,” I said. “Silas was a ballplayer.” “Real ballplayer,” Adrian agreed.

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In the outside world, a person can be a hero one second and a nobody the next. Think about it. Do white people remember the names of those guys who dove into that icy river to rescue passengers from that plane wreck a few years back? Hell, white people don’t even remember the names of the dogs who save entire families from burning up in house fires by barking. And, to be honest, I don’t remember none of those names either, but a reservation hero is remembered. A reservation hero is a hero forever. In fact, their status grows over the years as the stories are told and retold.

“Yeah,” Adrian said. “It’s too bad that damn diabetes got him. Silas was always talking about a comeback.”

“Too bad, too bad.” We both leaned further back into our chairs. Silence. We

watched the grass grow, the rivers flow, the winds blow. “Damn,” Adrian asked. “When did that fucking traffic

signal quit working?” “Don’t know.” “Shit, they better fix it. Might cause an accident.” We both looked at each other, looked at the traffic signal,

knew that about only one car an hour passed by, and laughed our asses off. Laughed so hard that when we tried to rearrange ourselves, Adrian ended up with my ass and I ended up with his.

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That looked so funny that we laughed them off again and it took us most of an hour to get them back right again.

Then we heard glass breaking in the distance. “Sounds like beer bottles,” Adrian said. “Yeah, Coors Light, I think.” “Bottled 1988.” We started to laugh, but a tribal cop drove by and cruised

down the road where Julius and his friends had walked earlier. “Think they’ll catch them?” I asked Adrian. “Always do.” After a few minutes, the tribal cop drove by again, with

Julius in the backseat and his friends running behind. “Hey,” Adrian asked. “What did he do?” “Threw a brick through a BIA pickup’s windshield,” one of

the Indian boys yelled back. “Told you it sounded like a pickup window,” I said. “Yeah, yeah, a 1982 Chevy.” “With red paint.” “No, blue.” We laughed for just a second. Then Adrian sighed long and

deep. He rubbed his head, ran his fingers through his hair, scratched his scalp hard.

“I think Julius is going to go bad,” he said.

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“No way,” I said. “He’s just horsing around.” “Maybe, maybe.” It’s hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass

sits on a table here, people don’t wonder if it’s half filled or half empty. They just hope it’s good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.

And, just like everybody else, Indians need heroes to help them learn how to survive. But what happens when our heroes don’t even know how to pay their bills?

“Shit, Adrian,” I said. “He’s just a kid.” “Ain’t no children on a reservation.” “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before. Well,” I said. “I guess

that Julius is pretty good in school, too.” “And?” “And he wants to maybe go to college.” “Really?” “Really,” I said and laughed. And I laughed because half of

me was happy and half of me wasn’t sure what else to do.

A year later, Adrian and I sat on the same porch in the same

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chairs. We’d done things in between, like ate and slept and read the newspaper. It was another hot summer. Then again, summer is supposed to be hot.

“I’m thirsty,” Adrian said. “Give me a beer.” “How many times do I have to tell you? We don’t drink

anymore.” “Shit,” Adrian said. “I keep forgetting. Give me a goddamn

Pepsi.” “That’s a whole case for you today already.” “Yeah, yeah, fuck these substitute addictions.” We sat there for a few minutes, hours, and then Julius

Windmaker staggered down the road. “Oh, look at that,” Adrian said. “Not even two in the

afternoon and he’s drunk as a skunk.” “Don’t he have a game tonight?” “Yeah, he does.” “Well, I hope he sobers up in time.” “Me, too.” I’d only played one game drunk and it was in an all-Indian

basketball tournament after I got out of high school. I’d been drinking the night before and woke up feeling kind of sick, so I got drunk again. Then I went out and played a game. I felt disconnected the whole time. Nothing seemed to fit right. Even

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my shoes, which had fit perfectly before, felt too big for my feet. I couldn’t even see the basketball or basket clearly. They were more like ideas. I mean, I knew where they were generally supposed to be, so I guessed at where I should be. Somehow or another, I scored ten points.

“He’s been drinking quite a bit, enit?” Adrian asked. “Yeah, I hear he’s even been drinking Sterno.” “Shit, that’ll kill his brain quicker than shit.” Adrian and I left the porch that night and went to the tribal

school to watch Julius play. He still looked good in his uniform, although he was a little puffy around the edges. But he just wasn’t the ballplayer we all remembered or expected. He missed shots, traveled, threw dumb passes that we all knew were dumb passes. By the fourth quarter, Julius sat at the end of the bench, hanging his head, and the crowd filed out, all talking about which of the younger players looked good. We talked about some kid named Lucy in the third grade who already had a nice move or two.

Everybody told their favorite Julius Windmaker stories, too. Times like that, on a reservation, a basketball game felt like a funeral and wake all rolled up together.

Back at home, on the porch, Adrian and I sat wrapped in shawls because the evening was kind of cold.

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“It’s too bad, too bad,” I said. “I thought Julius might be the one to make it all the way.”

“I told you he wouldn’t. I told you so.” “Yeah, yeah. Don’t rub it in.” We sat there in silence and remembered all of our heroes,

ballplayers from seven generations, all the way back. It hurts to lose any of them because Indians kind of see ballplayers as saviors. I mean, if basketball would have been around, I’m sure Jesus Christ would’ve been the best point guard in Nazareth. Probably the best player in the entire world. And in the beyond. I just can’t explain how much losing Julius Windmaker hurt us all.

“Well,” Adrian asked. “What do you want to do tomorrow?” “Don’t know.” “Shit, that damn traffic signal is still broken. Look.” Adrian pointed down the road and he was right. But what’s

the point of fixing it in a place where the STOP signs are just suggestions?

“What time is it?” Adrian asked. “I don’t know. Ten, I think.” “Let’s go somewhere.” “Where?” “I don’t know, Spokane, anywhere. Let’s just go.” “Okay,” I said, and we both walked inside the house, shut

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the door, and locked it tight. No. We left it open just a little bit in case some crazy Indian needed a place to sleep. And in the morning we found crazy Julius passed out on the living room carpet.

“Hey, you bum,” Adrian yelled. “Get off my floor.” “This is my house, Adrian,” I said. “That’s right. I forgot. Hey, you bum, get your ass off

Victor’s floor.” Julius groaned and farted but he didn’t wake up. It really

didn’t bother Adrian that Julius was on the floor, so he threw an old blanket on top of him. Adrian and I grabbed our morning coffee and went back out to sit on the porch. We had both just about finished our cups when a group of Indian kids walked by, all holding basketballs of various shapes and conditions.

“Hey, look,” Adrian said. “Ain’t that the Lucy girl?” I saw that it was, a little brown girl with scarred knees,

wearing her daddy’s shirt. “Yeah, that’s her,” I said. “I heard she’s so good that she plays for the sixth grade

boys team.” “Really? She’s only in third grade herself, isn’t she?” “Yeah, yeah, she’s a little warrior.” Adrian and I watched those Indian children walk down the

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road, walking toward another basketball game. “God, I hope she makes it all the way,” I said. “Yeah, yeah,” Adrian said, stared into the bottom of his cup,

and then threw it across the yard. And we both watched it with all of our eyes, while the sun rose straight up above us and settled down behind the house, watched that cup revolve, revolve, until it came down whole to the ground.

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AMUSEMENTS I lower a frayed rope into the depths and hoist

the same old Indian tears to my eyes. The liquid is pure and irresistible.

—Adrian C. Louis

AFTER SUMMER HEAT and too much coat-pocket whiskey, Dirty Joe passed out on the worn grass of the carnival midway and Sadie and I stood over him, looked down at his flat face, a map for all the wars he fought in the Indian bars. Dirty Joe was no warrior in the old sense. He got his name because he cruised the taverns at closing time, drank all the half-empties and never cared who might have left them there.

“What the hell do we do with him?” I asked Sadie. “Ah, Victor, let’s leave the old bastard here,” Sadie said, but

we both knew we couldn’t leave another Indian passed out in the middle of a white carnival. Then again, we didn’t want to carry his temporarily dead body to wherever it was we were headed next.

“We leave him here and he’s going to jail for sure,” I said. “Maybe the drunk tank will do him some good,” she said,

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sat down hard on the grass, her hair falling out of the braid. A century ago she might have been beautiful, her face reflected in the river instead of a mirror. But all the years have changed more than the shape of our blood and eyes. We wear fear now like a turquoise choker, like a familiar shawl.

We sat there beside Dirty Joe and watched all the white tourists watch us, laugh, point a finger, their faces twisted with hate and disgust. I was afraid of all of them, wanted to hide behind my Indian teeth, the quick joke.

“Shit,” I said. “We should be charging admission for this show.”

“Yeah, a quarter a head and we’d be drinking Coors Light for a week.”

“For the rest of our lives, enit?” After a while I started to agree with Sadie about leaving

Dirty Joe to the broom and dustpan. I was just about to stand up when I heard a scream behind me, turned quick to find out what the hell was going on, and saw the reason: a miniature roller coaster called the Stallion.

“Sadie,” I said. “Let’s put him on the roller coaster.” She smiled for the first time in four or five hundred years

and got to her feet. “That’s a real shitty thing to do,” she said, laughed, grabbed

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his arms while I got his legs, and we carried him over to the Stallion.

“Hey,” I asked the carny. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you let my cousin here ride this thing all day.”

The carny looked at me, at Dirty Joe, back at me and smiled.

“He’s drunk as a skunk. He might get hurt.” “Shit,” I said. “Indians ain’t afraid of a little gravity.” “Oh, hell,” the carny said. “Why not?” We loaded Dirty Joe into the last car and checked his

pockets for anything potentially lethal. Nothing. Sadie and I stood there and watched Dirty Joe ride a few times around the circle, his head rolling from side to side, back and forth. He looked like an old blanket we gave away.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus,” Sadie screamed, laughed. She leaned on my shoulder and laughed until tears fell. I looked around and saw a crowd had gathered and joined in on the laughter. Twenty or thirty white faces, open mouths grown large and deafening, wide eyes turned toward Sadie and me. They were jury and judge for the twentieth-century fancydance of these court jesters who would pour Thunderbird wine into the Holy Grail.

“Sadie, I think we better get out of here.” “Oh, shit,” she said, realizing what we had done. “Let’s go.”

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“Wait, we have to get Dirty Joe.” “We ain’t got time,” she said and pulled me away from the

crowd. We walked fast and did our best to be anything but Indian. Two little redheaded boys ran by, made Indian noises with their mouths, and as I turned to watch them, one pointed his finger at me and shot.

“Bang,” he yelled. “You’re dead, Indian.” I looked back over to the Stallion, watched Dirty Joe regain

consciousness and lift his head and search for something familiar.

“Sadie, he’s awake. We got to go get him.” “Go get him yourself,” she said and walked away from me. I

watched her move against the crowd, the only person not running to see the drunk Indian riding the Stallion. I turned back in time to watch Dirty Joe stumble from the roller coaster and empty his stomach on the platform. The carny yelled something I couldn’t hear, pushed Dirty Joe from behind, and sent him tumbling down the stairs face-first into the grass.

The crowd formed a circle around Dirty Joe; some thin man in a big hat counted like Dirty Joe was a fighter on the canvas. Two security guards pushed through the people, using their billy clubs for leverage. One knelt down beside Dirty Joe while the other spoke to the carny. The carny waved his arms wildly,

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explained his position, and they both turned toward me. The carny pointed, although he didn’t have to, and the guard jumped off the platform.

“Okay, chief,” he yelled. “Get your ass over here.” I backpedaled, turned and ran, and could hear the guard behind me as I ran down the midway, past a surprised carny into the fun house where I stumbled through a revolving tunnel, jumped a railing, ran through a curtain, and found myself staring at a three-foot-tall reflection.

Crazy mirrors, I thought as the security guard fell from the tunnel, climbed to his feet, and pulled his billy club from his belt.

Crazy mirrors, I thought, the kind that distort your features, make you fatter, thinner, taller, shorter. The kind that make a white man remember he’s the master of ceremonies, barking about the Fat Lady, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Indian who offered up another Indian like some treaty.

Crazy mirrors, I thought, the kind that can never change the dark of your eyes and the folding shut of the good part of your past.

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THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO SAY PHOENIX,

ARIZONA JUST AFTER VICTOR LOST his job at the BIA, he also found out that his father had died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona. Victor hadn’t seen his father in a few years, only talked to him on the telephone once or twice, but there still was a genetic pain, which was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken bone.

Victor didn’t have any money. Who does have money on a reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks salespeople? His father had a savings account waiting to be claimed, but Victor needed to find a way to get to Phoenix. Victor’s mother was just as poor as he was, and the rest of his family didn’t have any use at all for him. So Victor called the Tribal Council.

“Listen,” Victor said. “My father just died. I need some money to get to Phoenix to make arrangements.”

“Now, Victor,” the council said. “You know we’re having a difficult time financially.”

“But I thought the council had special funds set aside for stuff like this.”

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“Now, Victor, we do have some money available for the proper return of tribal members’ bodies. But I don’t think we have enough to bring your father all the way back from Phoenix.”

“Well,” Victor said. “It ain’t going to cost all that much. He had to be cremated. Things were kind of ugly. He died of a heart attack in his trailer and nobody found him for a week. It was really hot, too. You get the picture.”

“Now, Victor, we’re sorry for your loss and the circumstances. But we can really only afford to give you one hundred dollars.”

“That’s not even enough for a plane ticket.” “Well, you might consider driving down to Phoenix.” “I don’t have a car. Besides, I was going to drive my

father’s pickup back up here.” “Now, Victor,” the council said. “We’re sure there is

somebody who could drive you to Phoenix. Or is there somebody who could lend you the rest of the money?”

“You know there ain’t nobody around with that kind of money.”

“Well, we’re sorry, Victor, but that’s the best we can do.” Victor accepted the Tribal Council’s offer. What else could

he do? So he signed the proper papers, picked up his check, and

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walked over to the Trading Post to cash it. While Victor stood in line, he watched Thomas Builds-the-

Fire standing near the magazine rack, talking to himself. Like he always did. Thomas was a storyteller that nobody wanted to listen to. That’s like being a dentist in a town where everybody has false teeth.

Victor and Thomas Builds-the-Fire were the same age, had grown up and played in the dirt together. Ever since Victor could remember, it was Thomas who always had something to say.

Once, when they were seven years old, when Victor’s father still lived with the family, Thomas closed his eyes and told Victor this story: “Your father’s heart is weak. He is afraid of his own family. He is afraid of you. Late at night he sits in the dark. Watches the television until there’s nothing but that white noise. Sometimes he feels like he wants to buy a motorcycle and ride away. He wants to run and hide. He doesn’t want to be found.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire had known that Victor’s father was going to leave, knew it before anyone. Now Victor stood in the Trading Post with a one-hundred-dollar check in his hand, wondering if Thomas knew that Victor’s father was dead, if he knew what was going to happen next.

Just then Thomas looked at Victor, smiled, and walked over to him.

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“Victor, I’m sorry about your father,” Thomas said. “How did you know about it?” Victor asked. “I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in

the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.” “Oh,” Victor said and looked around the Trading Post. All

the other Indians stared, surprised that Victor was even talking to Thomas. Nobody talked to Thomas anymore because he told the same damn stories over and over again. Victor was embarrassed, but he thought that Thomas might be able to help him. Victor felt a sudden need for tradition.

“I can lend you the money you need,” Thomas said suddenly. “But you have to take me with you.”

“I can’t take your money,” Victor said. “I mean, I haven’t hardly talked to you in years. We’re not really friends anymore.”

“I didn’t say we were friends. I said you had to take me with you.”

“Let me think about it.” Victor went home with his one hundred dollars and sat at

the kitchen table. He held his head in his hands and thought about Thomas Builds-the-Fire, remembered little details, tears and scars, the bicycle they shared for a summer, so many stories.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire sat on the bicycle, waited in Victor’s

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yard. He was ten years old and skinny. His hair was dirty because it was the Fourth of July.

“Victor,” Thomas yelled. “Hurry up. We’re going to miss the fireworks.”

After a few minutes, Victor ran out of his house, jumped the porch railing, and landed gracefully on the sidewalk.

“And the judges award him a 9.95, the highest score of the summer,” Thomas said, clapped, laughed.

“That was perfect, cousin,” Victor said. “And it’s my turn to ride the bike.”

Thomas gave up the bike and they headed for the fairgrounds. It was nearly dark and the fireworks were about to start.

“You know,” Thomas said. “It’s strange how us Indians celebrate the Fourth of July. It ain’t like it was our independence everybody was fighting for.”

“You think about things too much,” Victor said. “It’s just supposed to be fun. Maybe Junior will be there.”

“Which Junior? Everybody on this reservation is named Junior.”

And they both laughed. The fireworks were small, hardly more than a few bottle

rockets and a fountain. But it was enough for two Indian boys.

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Years later, they would need much more. Afterwards, sitting in the dark, fighting off mosquitoes,

Victor turned to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. “Hey,” Victor said. “Tell me a story.” Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: “There were

these two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friends cheered and their parents’ eyes shone with pride. You were very brave, everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very brave.”

“Ya-hey,” Victor said. “That’s a good one. I wish I could be a warrior.”

“Me, too,” Thomas said. They went home together in the dark, Thomas on the bike

now, Victor on foot. They walked through shadows and light from streetlamps.

“We’ve come a long ways,” Thomas said. “We have outdoor lighting.”

“All I need is the stars,” Victor said. “And besides, you still think about things too much.”

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They separated then, each headed for home, both laughing all the way.

Victor sat at his kitchen table. He counted his one hundred dollars again and again. He knew he needed more to make it to Phoenix and back. He knew he needed Thomas Builds-the-Fire. So he put his money in his wallet and opened the front door to find Thomas on the porch.

“Ya-hey, Victor,” Thomas said. “I knew you’d call me.” Thomas walked into the living room and sat down on

Victor’s favorite chair. “I’ve got some money saved up,” Thomas said. “It’s enough

to get us down there, but you have to get us back.” “I’ve got this hundred dollars,” Victor said. “And my dad

had a savings account I’m going to claim.” “How much in your dad’s account?” “Enough. A few hundred.” “Sounds good. When we leaving?”

When they were fifteen and had long since stopped being friends, Victor and Thomas got into a fistfight. That is, Victor was really drunk and beat Thomas up for no reason at all. All the other Indian boys stood around and watched it happen. Junior was there and so were Lester, Seymour, and a lot of others. The "******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook- converter.com*******"

beating might have gone on until Thomas was dead if Norma Many Horses hadn’t come along and stopped it.

“Hey, you boys,” Norma yelled and jumped out of her car. “Leave him alone.”

If it had been someone else, even another man, the Indian boys would’ve just ignored the warnings. But Norma was a warrior. She was powerful. She could have picked up any two of the boys and smashed their skulls together. But worse than that, she would have dragged them all over to some tipi and made them listen to some elder tell a dusty old story.

The Indian boys scattered, and Norma walked over to Thomas and picked him up.

“Hey, little man, are you okay?” she asked. Thomas gave her a thumbs up. “Why they always picking on you?” Thomas shook his head, closed his eyes, but no stories came

to him, no words or music. He just wanted to go home, to lie in his bed and let his dreams tell his stories for him.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Victor sat next to each other in the airplane, coach section. A tiny white woman had the window seat. She was busy twisting her body into pretzels. She was flexible.

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“I have to ask,” Thomas said, and Victor closed his eyes in embarrassment.

“Don’t,” Victor said. “Excuse me, miss,” Thomas asked. “Are you a gymnast or

something?” “There’s no something about it,” she said. “I was first

alternate on the 1980 Olympic team.” “Really?” Thomas asked. “Really.” “I mean, you used to be a world-class athlete?” Thomas

asked. “My husband still thinks I am.” Thomas Builds-the-Fire smiled. She was a mental gymnast,

too. She pulled her leg straight up against her body so that she could’ve kissed her kneecap.

“I wish I could do that,” Thomas said. Victor was ready to jump out of the plane. Thomas, that

crazy Indian storyteller with ratty old braids and broken teeth, was flirting with a beautiful Olympic gymnast. Nobody back home on the reservation would ever believe it.

“Well,” the gymnast said. “It’s easy. Try it.” Thomas grabbed at his leg and tried to pull it up into the

same position as the gymnast. He couldn’t even come close,

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which made Victor and the gymnast laugh. “Hey,” she asked. “You two are Indian, right?” “Full-blood,” Victor said. “Not me,” Thomas said. “I’m half magician on my mother’s

side and half clown on my father’s.” They all laughed. “What are your names?” she asked. “Victor and Thomas.” “Mine is Cathy. Pleased to meet you all.” The three of them talked for the duration of the flight. Cathy

the gymnast complained about the government, how they screwed the 1980 Olympic team by boycotting.

“Sounds like you all got a lot in common with Indians,” Thomas said.

Nobody laughed. After the plane landed in Phoenix and they had all found

their way to the terminal, Cathy the gymnast smiled and waved good-bye.

“She was really nice,” Thomas said. “Yeah, but everybody talks to everybody on airplanes,”

Victor said. “It’s too bad we can’t always be that way.” “You always used to tell me I think too much,” Thomas