Reservation Blues - Alexie Sherman (6 page)

Indian boy, don't go away
Indian
boy, what did you say?
Indian boy, I'll turn
on the light
Indian boy, come home tonight

Most of the Spokane Indian women wanted to kick Betty
and Veronica off the reservation, but the Indian men lined up every
night to listen to the white women' s songs. David WalksAlong had
even invited them to his home for dinner. WalksAlong was nearly a
gourmet cook and could do wondrous things with commodity food. But
Betty and Veronica were scared of Michael White Hawk. They did go
home with Junior and Victor one night, and everybody on the
reservation knew about it. Little Indian boys crept around the house
and tried to peek in the windows. All of them swore they saw the
white women naked, then bragged it wasn't the first time they'd seen
a naked white woman. None of them had seen a naked Indian woman, let
alone a white woman. But the numbers of naked white women who had
visited the Spokane Indian Reservation rapidly grew in the boys'
imaginations, as if the size of their lies proved they were warriors.

Betty and Veronica did not take off their clothes
that night, although Betty shared a bed with Junior and Veronica with
Victor. "Am I your first Indian man?" Junior asked Betty.

"No."

"
How many?"

"A few."

"
How many is a few?"

"About five or six, I guess."

"
You guess?"

"Well, some were only part Indian," Betty
said.

"Jeez, which part?" asked Junior. Betty
kissed him then to shut him up. Both fell asleep with their shoes on.

In the other bedroom, Victor had his hand down
Veronica's pants within a few seconds. She kept pushing it away, but
Victor was persistent.

"
Stop," Veronica said. "I don't want
you to do that."

"Why you come in here, then?" Victor asked.

"Because I like you."

"How much do you like me?"

"You're the best. I mean, you're an Indian and a
guitar player. How much better could you be?"

Victor pushed his hand down her pants again.

"
Please stop," she said. "I just want
to kiss. I'm not ready to do that."

Victor removed his hand but pushed Veronica's head
down near his crotch.

"
Do that," he said.

"
No, I don't do that. I don't like it."

"Come on."

"No. But I'Il do it with my hand."

Victor unbuttoned his pants and closed his eyes.
Afterwards, Veronica curled up next to him as he snored. She was cold
and wanted to get under the blankets but didn't want to wake him up.

Betty and Veronica left the next morning, before
Junior and Victor even woke, but they left a note. junior read it to
Victor.

"Shit," Victor said. "They live
where?"

"
Seattle," junior said. "They have to
go back to work."

"
Work? Where do they work?"

"
At some bookstore, I guess. But it says here
they own the bookstore."

"Own the bookstore? Man, they must be rich,
enit?"

"I guess."

Betty and Veronica were co-owners of a New Age
bookstore in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle. They had
temporarily closed it down when rumors of the all-Indian rock band
hit the store. They had driven to Wellpinit, three hundred and six
miles away, in six hours.

"What's the name of the bookstore?" Victor
asked.

"I don't know. They left a bookmark though. It
says ‘Doppelgangers'."

"
What the hell is a doppelganger?"

"
I think it means twins or something. Like a
shadow of you."

"White shadows, enit?" Victor asked.

"I guess," Junior said.

"Do you think they'll be back?"

"I hope so."

* * *

The gossip about the band spread from reservation to
reservation. All kinds of Indians showed up: Yakama, Lummi, Makah,
Snohomish, Coeur d'Alene. Thomas and his band had developed a small
following before they ever played a gig. If they'd had a phone, it
would have been ringing. If they'd had a post office box, it would
have been stuffed. Indians talked about the band at powwows and
feasts, at softball tournaments and education conferences. But the
band still didn't have a name.

"We need a name for this band," Thomas said
after another well-attended rehearsal.

"How about Bloodthirsty Savages?" Victor
asked.

"That's a cool name, enit?" Junior asked.

"I was thinking about Coyote Springs,"
Thomas said.

"That's too damn Indian," Junior said.
"It's always Coyote this, Coyote that. I'm sick of Coyote."

"Fuck Coyote," Victor said.

Lightning fell on the reservation right then, and a
small fire started down near the Midnight Uranium Mine. Coyote stole
Junior's water truck and hid it in the abandoned dance hall at the
pow-wow grounds. The truck was too big for the doors, so nobody was
sure how that truck fit in there. Junior lost his job, but he had to
take that truck apart piece by piece and reassemble it outside first.

The entire band was unemployed now, and Coyote had
proven his strength, so the band accepted the name and became Coyote
Springs. But it wasn't a happy marriage. Coyote Springs argued back
and forth all the time. Victor and Junior threatened to quit the band
every day, and Thomas brought them back with promises of money and
magazine covers. Victor and Junior liked to sit outside the Trading
Post in Thomas's blue van and pose for all the women who happened to
walk by.

"Ya-hey," Victor called out to the
full-blood Indian women. He also called out to the white women who
worked for the Tribe, especially those nurses from the IHS Clinic.
Victor had a thing for white nylons, but the nurses ignored him.

"Ya-hey," the Indian women shouted back,
which was the extent of conversation. Most Indians never needed to
say much to each other. Entire reservation romances began,
flourished, and died during the hour-long wait to receive commodity
food on the first of each month.

At first, Coyote Springs just played covers of other
people's songs. They already knew every Hank Williams song intimately
because that's all their fathers sang when drunk. They learned the
entire Buddy Holly catalogue, picked up a few Aerosmith songs, and
sang Spokane Indian words in place of the Spanish in Ritchie Valens's
version of "La Bamba."

"You know," Thomas said, "I'm going to
start writing our own songs."

"
Why?" Junior asked.

"Well," Thomas said, "because Buddy
Holly wasn't a Spokane Indian."

"Wait," junior said. "Buddy was my
cousin."

"
That's true," Victor said. "He was
quarter-blood, enit?"

"Besides," Victor said, "how come you
get to write the songs?"

"Yeah," Junior said.

"Because I have the money," Thomas said. He
had forty-two dollars in his pocket and another fifty hidden at home,
much more than Junior and Victor had together. Victor understood the
economics of the deal, how money equals power, especially on a
reservation so poor that a dollar bill once changed the outcome of
tribal elections. David WalksAlong was elected Councilman by a single
vote because he'd paid Lester FallsApart a dollar to punch the ballot
for him.

"Okay, then, asshole," Victor said, "write
the songs. But I'm still the Guitar God."

So Thomas went home and tried to write their first
song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for
the song. He waited and waited. It's nearly impossible to write a
song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn't know that. He'd never
written a song before.

"‘
Please, " Thomas prayed.

But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his
eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. He turned on the
television and watched The Sound of Music on channel four. Julie
Andrews put him to sleep for the seventy-sixth time, and neither
story nor song came in his dreams. After he woke up, he paced around
the room, stood on his porch, and listened to those faint voices that
echoed all over the reservation. Everybody heard those voices, but
nobody liked to talk about them. They were loudest at night, when
Thomas tried to sleep, and he always thought they sounded like
horses.

For hours, Thomas waited for the song. Then, hungry
and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and
discovered that he didn't have any food. So he closed the fridge and
opened it again, but it was still empty. In a ceremony that he had
practiced since his youth, he opened, closed, and opened the fridge
again, expecting an immaculate conception of a jar of pickles. Thomas
was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven different
ways to say fry bread.

Fry bread. Water, flour, salt, rolled and molded into
shape, dropped into hot oil. A traditional food. A simple recipe. But
Indians could spend their whole lives looking for the perfect piece
of fry bread. The tribe held a fry bread cooking contest every year,
and most Spokanes had their own recipe. Contestants gossiped about
the latest secret ingredient. Even the little kids dropped their
basketballs long enough to roll up their own bread, while Lester
FallsApart mixed his flour with Thunderbird Wine.

Big Mom came down from her mountain annually and won
the contest for thirty-seven straight years.
The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota had taken second place for the last
twenty years.

"
Fry bread," Jana Wind had whispered into
the ear of Bobby Running-Jones as they lay down together.

"Well, fry bread to you, too, " Bobby had
said to Jana after he came home late from the bar.

"
Do you want to do the fry bread?" Indian
boys often asked Indian girls at their very first reservation high
school dance.

"Shit," Victor had said once. "I ain't
got much fry bread left. How long before we get to play some real
music?"

As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas
sat again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song, and called it
"Reservation Blues. " Soon after that, the Federal Express
showed up at his door with an overnight package.

"This is for Thomas Builds-the-Fire," the
FedEx guy said. He was nervous and kept scanning the tree line.

"I'm him," Thomas said.

"
Sign here," the FedEx guy said. "Did
you know I was in the war?"

"Which war?"

"All of them," the FedEx guy said, handed
the package over, and ran for his van. Thomas waved. The FedEx guy
smiled, saluted, and drove away. Thomas figured that Federal Express
sent its bravest and craziest couriers out to the reservation, but
that made sense. Thomas opened the package. It was a letter from some
Flathead Indian in Arlee, Montana. He said he was the owner of the
Tipi Pole Tavern and wanted Coyote Springs to come play that weekend.
He would pay.

"He'll pay," Thomas whispered, then
chanted, then sang.

* * *

From Thomas Builds-the-Fire's journal:

Coyote: A small canid (Canis Iatrans) native to
western North America that is closely related to the American wolf
and whose cry has often been compared to that of Sippie Wallace and
Janis Joplin, among others.

Coyote: A traditional figure in Native American
mythology, alternately responsible for the creation of the earth and
for some of the more ignorant acts after the fact.

Coyote: A trickster whose bag of tricks contains
permutations of love, hate, weather, chance, laughter, and tears,
e.g., Lucille Ball.

Spring: An ultimate source of supply, especially a
source of water issuing from the ground.

Spring: To issue with speed and force, as in a raging
guitar solo.

Spring: To make a leap or series of leaps, e.g., from
stage to waiting arms of Indian and non-Indian fans.

* * *

The blue van, tattered and bruised, cruised down an
anonymous highway on the Flathead Indian Reservation and searched for
the dirt road that led to the Tipi Pole Tavern. Actually, Thomas,
Junior, and Victor attempted to drive and navigate. As a result of
this partnership, the blue van and its three occupants, along with
their musical equipment, were lost.

"Shit, Junior," Victor said, "there
ain't but two or three roads on this whole reservation, and you're
telling me we're lost."

"This goddamn map is useless," Junior said.
"There are all sorts of roads ain't even on it. This road we're
on now ain't on the map."

"Listen," Thomas said, "maps just give
advice anyway."

The blue van suddenly stopped at a crossroads.

"Which way?" Thomas asked because he was
driving.

"
I don't know," Victor and Junior said
because they weren't driving.

"Let's decide it the old Indian way,"
Thomas said because he tried to be as traditional as the twentieth
century allowed.