Reservation Blues - Alexie Sherman (2 page)

As she stepped out of her front door, Big Mom heard
the first gunshot, which reverberated in her DNA. She pulled her
dress up around her waist and ran for the clearing, heard a gunshot
with each of her footfalls. All she heard were the gunshots, singular
at first, and then in rapid plural bursts that she could not count.
Big Mom ran to the rise above the clearing where the horses gathered.
There, she saw the future and the past, the white soldiers in blue
uniforms with black rifles and pistols. She saw the Indian horses
shot and fallen like tattered sheets. Big Mom stood on the rise and
watched the horses fall, until only one remained. Big Mom watched the
Indian colt circled by soldiers. The colt darted from side to side,
looked for escape. One soldier, an officer, stepped down from his
pony, walked over to the colt, gently touched its face, and whispered
in its ear. The colt shivered as the officer put his pistol between
its eyes and pulled the trigger. That colt fell to the grass of the
clearing, to the sidewalk outside a reservation tavern, to the cold,
hard coroner's table in a Veterans Hospital.

Big Mom wept as the soldiers rode away on their own
pale ponies and heard their trumpets long after. She walked to the
clearing where the horses had fallen, walked from corpse to corpse,
and searched for any sign of life. After she counted the dead, she
sang a mourning song for forty days and nights, then wiped the tears
away, and buried the bodies. But she saved the bones of the most
beautiful horse she found and built a flute from its ribs. Big Mom
played a new flute song every morning to remind everybody that music
created and recreated the world daily.
 

In 1992, Big Mom still watched for the return of
those slaughtered horses and listened to their songs. With each
successive generation, the horses arrived in different forms and with
different songs, called themselves Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin
Gaye, and so many other names. Those horses rose from everywhere and
turned to Big Mom for rescue, but they all fell back into the earth
again.

For seven generations, Big Mom had received those
horses and held them in her arms. Now on a bright summer day, she
watched a black man walk onto the Spokane Indian Reservation. She
heard that black man talk to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. She watched
Thomas give that black man a ride to the base of her mountain and
smiled as the blue van shuddered to a stop. Big Mom sat in her
rocking chair and waited to greet her latest visitor.

* * *

"The end of the world is near!" shouted the
crazy old Indian man in front of the Spokane Tribal Trading Post. He
wasn't a Spokane Indian, but nobody knew what tribe he was. Some said
Lakota Sioux because he had cheekbones so big that he knocked people
over when he moved his head from side to side. The old man was tall,
taller than any of the Spokanes, even though age had shrunk him a
bit. People figured he was close to seven feet tall in his youth.
He'd come to play in an all-Indian basketball tournament in Wellpinit
thirty years ago and had never left. None of the Spokanes paid him
much mind because they already knew the end was just around the
corner, a few miles west, down by Turtle Lake.

Thomas was the only Spokane who talked much to
the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota. But then, most of the Spokanes
thought Thomas was pretty goofy, especially after he gave Robert
Johnson that ride up to Big Mom's place. Thomas had carried Johnson's
guitar around with him ever since then. He so strongly identified
with that guitar that he wrapped it in a beautiful quilt and gave it
a place of honor in his living room. When he went out for his daily
walks, Thomas cradled the guitar like a baby, oblivious to the
laughter all around him. But  the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota
didn't laugh at Thomas.

"Ya-hey," Thomas called out.

"
Ya-hey, Thomas, "
the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. "The end of the world is
near."

"I know it is," Thomas said and dropped a
few coins into the old man's hat, which already contained some change
and a check from Father Arnold, priest of the Catholic Church.
Although the Spokanes ignored the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota, they
weren't going to let him starve, and Father Arnold constantly
recruited lost souls.

"That's a good-looking guitar,"
the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. "I hear you got it from
the black man."

"
That I did," Thomas said.

"
You be careful with that music, enit? Music is
a dangerous thing."

Thomas smiled and walked into the Trading Post, one
of the few lucrative businesses on the reservation. Its shelves were
stocked with reservation staples: Diet Pepsi, Spam, Wonder bread, and
a cornucopia of various carbohydrates, none of them complex. One
corner of the Trading Post was devoted to the gambling machines that
had become mandatory on every reservation. The Tribe had installed a
few new slot machines earlier that day, and the Spokanes lined up to
play. Dreams of the jackpot. Some Indian won a few hundred dollars
every afternoon and fell down broke by the next morning. Thomas
didn't gamble with his money, but he did gamble with his stomach when
he heated up a microwave burrito. He paid for the burrito and a Pepsi
and, carrying his food and guitar, walked back outside to eat.

He sat on a curb outside the Trading Post, hungry and
ready to eat, just as Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin walked up.
Victor was the reservation John Travolta because he still wore
clothes from the disco era. He had won a few thousand dollars in Reno
way back in 1979, just after he graduated from high school. He bought
a closet full of silk shirts and polyester pants and had never had
any money since then to buy anything new. He hadn't gained any weight
in thirteen years, but the clothes were tattered and barely held to
his body. His wardrobe made him an angry man.

"Ya-hey, Builds-the-Shithouse," Victor
said.

"Ya-hey," Thomas said.

"
Is that your guitar?" Junior Polatkin
asked.

"That's his woman," Victor said.

Junior Polatkin was Victor's sidekick, but nobody
could figure out why, since junior was supposed to be smart. A tall,
good-looking buck with hair like Indians in the movies, long,
purple-black, and straight, Junior was president of the Native
American Hair Club. If there had been a hair bank, like a blood bank
or sperm bank, Junior could have donated yards of the stuff and made
a fortune. He drove a water truck for the Bureau of Indian Affairs
and had even attended college for a semester or two. There were
rumors he had fathered a white baby or two at school.

A job was hard to come by on the reservation, even
harder to keep, and most figured that Victor used Junior for his
regular income, but nobody ever knew what Junior saw in Victor.
Still, Junior could be an asshole, too, because Victor was extremely
contagious.

"
This isn't my guitar," Thomas said. "But
I'm going to change the world with it."

Victor and junior sat beside Thomas, one on either
side. The three Spokane Indians sat together on the sidewalk in front
of the Trading Post. Everybody likes to have a place to think, to
meditate, to eat a burrito, and that particular piece of accidental
sidewalk mostly belonged to Thomas. He usually sat there alone but
now shared it with Victor and Junior, two of the most accomplished
bullies of recent Native American history.

A few years earlier, after the parking lot for the
Trading Post was built, the BIA contractor had a little bit of cement
left over. So he decided to build a sidewalk rather than lug the
cement all the way back to the warehouse and fill out complicated,
unnecessary, and official government papers. Thomas was watching the
BIA workers pour the cement and never saw Victor and Junior sneak up
on him. Victor and Junior knocked Thomas over, pressed his face into
the wet cement, and left a permanent impression in the sidewalk. The
doctors at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane removed the cement from
his skin, but the scars remained on his face. The sidewalk belonged
to Thomas because of that pain.

"
You named that guitar?" Junior asked.

"It's a secret name," Thomas said. "I
ain't ever going to tell anybody.

Victor pulled Thomas into a quick headlock.

"Tell me," Victor said and cut off Thomas's
air for a second.

"Come on," Junior said. "Take it
easy."

"
I ain't letting you go until you tell me,"
Victor said.

Thomas was not surprised by Victor's sudden violence.
These little wars were intimate affairs for those who dreamed in
childhood of fishing for salmon but woke up as adults to shop at the
Trading Post and stand in line for U.S.D.A. commodity food instead.
They savagely, repeatedly, opened up cans of commodities and wept
over the rancid meat, forced to eat what stray dogs ignored. Indian
men like Victor roared from place to place, set fires, broke windows,
and picked on the weaker members of the Tribe. Thomas had been the
weakest Indian boy on the whole reservation, so small and skinny,
with bigger wrists than arms, a head too large for its body, and ugly
government glasses. When he grew older and stronger, grew into an
Indian man, he was the smallest Indian man on the reservation.

"Tell me the name of your goddamned guitar,"
Victor said and squeezed Thomas a little harder.

Thomas didn't say a word, didn't struggle, but
thought
It's a good day to die. It's a good
day to get my ass kicked.

"
Come on, Victor," Junior said. "Let
him go. He ain't going to tell us nothing."

"
I ain't leaving until he tells us," Victor
said, but then had a brainstorm. "Or until he plays us a song."

"
No way," Junior said. "I don't want
to hear that."

"I'II make you a deal," Thomas said. "If
I can play your favorite Patsy Cline song, will you leave me alone?"

"What happens if you can't play the song?"
Victor asked.

"
Then you can kick my ass some more."

"
We'll kick your ass anyway," Victor said.
"If you can't play the song, we get the guitar."

"That's a pretty good deal, enit?" Junior
asked.

"Enit," Victor said. "It's better than
hearing another one of his goddamn stories.

Thomas repeated stories constantly. All the other
Indians on the reservation heard those stories so often that the
words crept into dreams. An Indian telling his friends about a dream
he had was halfway through the telling before everyone realized it
was actually one of Thomas's stealth stories. Even the white people
on the reservation grew tired of Thomas's stories, but they were more
polite when they ran away.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your
clothes like sand, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If
you repeated even a sentence from one of those stories, your throat
was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair
like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out.
Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas,
tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly
and tried to sweet-talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises
about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of
that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.

"
I got a better idea," Victor added. "If
you can't play the song, then you have to stop telling all your
fucking stories."

"Okay," Thomas said, "but you have to
let me go first."

Victor released Thomas from the headlock but picked
up the guitar and smashed it against the sidewalk. Then he handed it
to Junior, who shrugged his shoulders and gave it back to Thomas.
Indians around the Trading Post watched this with indifference or
ignored it altogether.

"There, " Victor said. "Now you can
play the song."

"Oh, yeah, enit," Junior said. "Play
it now."

Thomas looked around at the little country he was
trying to save, this reservation hidden away in the corner of the
world. He knew that Victor and Junior were fragile as eggs, despite
their warrior disguises. He held that cracked guitar tenderly,
strummed the first chord, and sang that Patsy Cline song about
falling to pieces.

Victor looked at Thomas, looked at Junior, sat on the
sidewalk again. Thomas managed to sing that song pretty well, but
Victor had been looking forward to the silence. He might have to kick
Thomas's ass anyway. Victor, fresh from thirty-two years of fried
chicken lunches, ran his hands along his greasy silk shirt and tried
to think.

"Jeez," Junior said, "that was pretty
good, Thomas. Where"d you learn to sing?"

"Shut the fuck up," Victor said. "I'm
thinking."

The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota watched these events
unfold. He walked over to the trio of Spokane Indians on the
sidewalk.

"The end of the world is near!"

"
When is that going to happen?" Junior
asked. "I need to set my alarm clock."

"Don't mock me,"
the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. "The end of the world is
near!"

"
Why don"t all of you shut up?" Victor
said.