The Toughest Indian in the World (27 page)

“With carbonated water,” I said.

“Yeah, but how do you get rid of carbonated-water stains?”

I washed his belly, washed the skin that was blue with cold and a dozen tattoos. I washed his arms and hands. I washed his legs and penis.

“You shouldn’t have to do this,” he said, his voice cracking. “You’re not a nurse.”

What is an Indian?
Is it a son who had always known where his father kept his clothes in neat military stacks?

I pulled a T-shirt over my father’s head. I slipped a pair of boxer shorts over his bandaged legs and up around his waist.

“How’s the bear?” I asked him, and he laughed until he gagged again, but there was nothing left in his stomach for him to lose. He was still laughing when I switched off the light, lay down beside him, and pulled the old quilt over us.

“You remember when I first made the tomato soup?” he asked me.

“Yeah, that summer at Ankeny’s.”

“The summer of Carla, as I recall.”

“I didn’t know you knew about her.”

“Jeez, you told everybody. That’s why she wouldn’t do it with you anymore. You hurt her feelings. You should have kept your mouth shut.”

“I had no idea.”

I wondered what would happen if I saw her again. Would she remember me with fondness or with regret?

“Before I threw up my soup, I was dreaming,” he said.

“About what?”

“I was dreaming there was a knock on the door and I got up and walked over there. I wasn’t walking on my stumps or anything. I was just sort of floating. And the knocking on the door was getting louder and louder. And I was getting mad, you know?”

I knew.

“And then I open up the door,” continued my father. “And I’m ready to yell, ready to shout, what the hell you want, right? But I don’t see anybody right away, until I look down, and there they are.”

“Your feet.”

“My feet.”

“Wow.”

“Wow, enit? Exactly. Wow. There’s my feet, my bare-ass feet just standing there on the porch.”

“They talked, enit?”

“Damn right, they talked. These little mouths opened up on the big toes, like some crazy little duet, and sang in Spanish.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“No, but they kept singing about Mexico.”

“You ever been to Mexico?”

“No. Never even been to California.”

I thought about my father’s opportunities and his failures, about the man he should have been and the man he had become.
What is an Indian?
Is it a man with a good memory? I thought about the pieces of my father—his children and grandchildren, his old shoes and unfinished novels—scattered all over the country. He was a man orphaned at six by his father’s soldierly death in Paris, France, and, three months later, by his mother’s cancerous fall in Spokane, Washington. I thought about my mother’s funeral and how my father had climbed into the coffin with her and how we, the stronger and weaker men of the family, had to pull him out screaming and kicking. I wondered if there was some kind of vestigial organ inside all of us that collected and stored our grief.

“Well, then, damn it,” I said. “We’re going to Mexico.”

Two hours later, my father and I sat (he couldn’t do anything but sit!) in Wonder Horse’s garage, which was really a converted old barn, while Wonder Horse and Sweetwater, reunited for this particular occasion, gave my battered van a quick tune-up.

“Hey,” said Wonder Horse. “You’ve been treating this van like it was a white man. It’s all messed up.”

Sweetwater, having returned to his usual and accustomed silence, nodded his head in agreement.

“You see,” continued Wonder Horse. “You have to treat your car with love. And I don’t mean love of an object. You see, that’s just wrong. That’s materialism. You have to love your car like it’s a sentient being, like it can love you back. Now, that’s some deep-down agape love. And you want to know why you should love your car like it can love you back?”

“Why?” asked my father and I simultaneously.

“Because it shows faith,” said Wonder Horse. “And that’s the best thing we Indians have left.”

Sweetwater pointed at Wonder Horse—a gesture of agreement, of affirmation, of
faith.

I looked around Wonder Horse’s garage, at the dozens of cars and pieces of cars strewn about. Most of them would never run again and served only as depositories for spare parts.

“What about all of these cars?” I asked. “They don’t look so well loved.”

“These selfless automobiles are organ donors,” said Wonder Horse. “And there’s no greater act of faith than that.”

“I’m an organ donor,” I said. “Says so right on my driver’s license.”

“That just means you’re a potential organ donor,” said Wonder Horse. “Ain’t nothing wrong with potential, but it ain’t real until it’s real.”

“Well, you’re potentially an asshole,” I said. “With a whole lot of potential to get wider and wider.”

The four of us, we all laughed; we were Indian men enjoying one another’s company. It happens all the time.

“I mean,” said Wonder Horse. “What would you be willing to give up to ensure somebody else’s happiness?”

“That’s a big question,” said my father.

“Tell me a big answer,” said Wonder Horse, and then he asked me this: “I mean, if you could give up your feet, would you give them to your father?”

“Oh, jeez,” said my father before I could answer. “Now we’re talking about potential. What kind of goofy operation would that be? I mean, if you could really do that, you wouldn’t take away living people’s feet, enit? You’d transplant dead people’s feet.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Sweetwater, then returned to his silence.

“Damn right, it’s disgusting,” said my father. “I mean, who’s to guarantee I’d get Indian feet? What if I got white feet? I’d be an Indian guy walking around on some white guy’s feet.”

“Hey, Long John Silver,” said Wonder Horse. “That would mean your feet would have a job, but you’d be unemployed.”

We all laughed again. We could afford to laugh because all four of us carried money in our wallets.

“But, come on,” Wonder Horse said to me. “Enough of the jokes. Would you give up your feet for your father?”

I looked at my father. He would be dead soon, maybe tomorrow, perhaps by the first snowfall, certainly by this time next year. I asked myself this: If I could take the days and years I had left to live, all of my remaining time, then divide that number by two, and give half of my life expectancy to my father, thereby extending his time on the planet, would I do it?

No,
I thought.
No, no, of course not.

“I tell you what I’d do,” I said. “I’d give up one of my feet.”

“Wouldn’t you be the matching pair?” asked Wonder Horse and ducked his head into the engine of my van. I saw us: two Indian men holding each other up, trying to maintain their collective balance.

“No,” I said. “We’d be opposites.”

Beginning in Wellpinit, Washington, my father and I traveled through Little Falls, Reardan, Davenport, Harrington, Downs, Ritzville, Lind, Connell, Pasco, Burbank, Attalia, Wallula, then across the border into Cold Springs, Oregon, and on through Hermiston, Stanfield, Pendleton, Pilot Rock, Nye, Battle Mountain, Dale, Long Creek, Fox, Beech Creek, Mt. Vernon, Canyon City, Seneca, Silvies, Burns, Riley, Wagonfire, Valley Falls, Lakeview, New Pine Creek, then across another border into Willow Ranch, California, and on through Davis Creek, Alturas, Likely, Madeline, Termo, Ravendale, Litchfield, Standish, Butingville, Milford, Doyle, Constantina, Hallelujah Junction, and then into Reno, Nevada.

From Reno, my father and I traveled to Carson City, Glenbrook, Zephyr Cove, Stateline, and then into Echo Summit, California, followed by Twin Bridges, Kyburz, Riverton, Pacific House, Diamond Springs, Plymouth, Drytown, 10 City, Jackson, San Andreas, Angels Camp, Tuttletown, Jamestown, Chinese Camp, Coulterville, Bear Valley, Mt. Bullion, Mariposa, Catheys Valley, Planada, Tuttle, Merced, El Nido, Red Top, Chowchill, Fairmead, Berenda, Madera, Herndon, Fresno, Easton, Hub, Armona, Stratford, Kettleman City, Devils Den, Blackwells Corner, McKittrick, Derby Acres, Fellows, Taft, Maricopa, Venucopa, Frazier Park, Forman, Pear Blossom, Littlerock, San Bernardino, Redlands, Beaumont, San Jacinto, Aquanga, Warner Springs, Santa Ysabel, Julian, Guatay, Boulevard, Campo, Potrero, and finally, just after sunrise, we arrived in Tecate, California.

Of course this was just the itinerary I had planned before our departure. Did we truly follow it? Do you think we had enough time?

Last Christmas, I woke up in my ex-wife’s house (God! She might have screwed her husband while I was sleeping just a dozen feet away!) and wondered if my son understood his own life, if he realized how privileged he was. But Paul wasn’t privileged because there were dozens of presents beneath the tree. (that was just evidence of his parents’ materialism, and not of what Wonder Horse would call deep-down agape love!) No, my son was privileged because his stepfather was a good man. It pained me to know that; it pained me to wake up on the floor of that good man’s house while he woke up with the woman who was the best part of my past tense.

I didn’t love her anymore, not like I did (another lie), but I wondered what would happen if you let the archaeologists dig into my buried temples. What artifacts would they bring to the surface? What would those recovered cups and tools mean to me then? What would be redeemed, remembered, reborn?

That last Christmas, I walked into the kitchen and made coffee, a simple ceremony that white people perform just as well and as often as Indians. I poured three cups and carried them upstairs.
What is an Indian?
Is it a man with waiting experience, a man who can carry ten cups at the same time, one looped in the hook of each finger and both thumbs? I knocked on their door (the ex-wife and her new husband) and waited for them to open it. Of course, I was stepping across boundaries. What if they had been making love at that precise moment? What if my ex-wife had been forced to push her husband (and his penis!) away from her and rush to the door? What if she’d appeared to me with flushed cheeks, racing heart, and wild hair? What if she had smelled like sex?

Instead, he opened the door, saw the coffee in my hands, and smiled.

“Oh, how nice,” he said and meant it. He took their coffees inside (I could hear the surprised murmur of her voice!) and then came back to me.

“We’ll be down in a few minutes,” he said. “I’m sure Paul is waiting for us.”

“Oh, no, he’s still asleep,” I said. Since birth, Paul had been able to sleep twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch, refusing to wake early even at Christmas. In this way, I felt I knew my son better than anybody else.

“Paul will be asleep when Jesus comes back,” said the stepfather. We both knew my son (our son?) and kept his secrets; we both loved him.
What is an Indian?
Is it a man who can share his son and his wife? I asked myself this: Would I take them back, would I break this good man’s heart, destroy his life, if I could be married again to this woman, if I could wake up every morning in the same house with this child?

Of course, of course I would break this white man’s heart. I would leave him alone in a cold house with an empty bank account and a one-bullet pistol in his hand.

“Merry Christmas,” said the stepfather.

“Yes,” I said and turned to leave, but the stepfather stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. Then he hugged me (Tightly! Chest to chest! Belly to belly!) and I hugged him back.

“Thank you for being kind to me,” he said. “I know it could be otherwise.”

I didn’t know what to say.

The stepfather held me at arm’s length. His eyes were blue.

“You’re a good man,” he said to me.

South of Tecate, California, the van broke down. Then, five minutes later, north of Tecate, Mexico, my father’s wheelchair broke down.

We stood (I was the only one standing!) on the hot pavement in the bright sun.

“We almost made it,” said my father.

“Somebody will pick us up,” I said.

“Would you pick us up?”

“Two brown guys, one in a wheelchair? I think the immigration cops might be picking us up.”

“Well, then, maybe they’ll think we’re illegal aliens and deport us.”

“That would be one hell of an ironic way to get into Mexico.”

I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he’d ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked my father.

“God has lots of potential,” he said.

“When you pray,” I asked him. “What do you pray about?”

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us.
What is an Indian?
I lifted my father and carried him across every border.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The story “The Toughest Indian in the World” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in
The New Yorker
.

Copyright © 2000 by Sherman Alexie

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

978-1-4804-5718-8

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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