The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie

Author:Sherman Alexie [Alexie, Sherman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Purchased From Amazon by GB, Contemporary Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781480457188
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

INDIAN COUNTRY

LOW MAN SMITH STEPPED off the airplane in Missoula, Montana, walked up the humid jetway, and entered the air-conditioned terminal. He was excited that he was about to see her, Carlotta, the Navajo woman who lived on the Flathead Indian Reservation. All during the flight from Seattle, he’d been wondering what he would first say to her, this poet who taught English at the Flathead Indian College, and had carried on a fierce and exhausting internal debate on the matter. He’d finally decided, just as the plane touched down, to begin his new life with a simple declaration: “Thank you for inviting me.”

He practiced those five words in his head—thank you for inviting me—and chastised himself for not learning to say them in her language, in Navajo, in Dine.

He was a Coeur d’Alene Indian, even though his mother was white. He’d been born and raised in Seattle, didn’t speak his own tribal language, and had visited his home reservation only six times in his life. His mother had often tried to push Low Man toward the reservation, toward his cousins, aunts, and uncles—all of those who had survived one war or another—but Low Man just wasn’t interested, especially after his Coeur d’Alene father died of a heart attack while welding together one of the last great ships in Elliott Bay. More accurately, Low Man’s father had drowned after his heart attack had knocked him unconscious and then off the boat into the water.

Low Man believed the Coeur d’Alene Reservation to be a monotonous place—a wet kind of monotony that white tourists saw as spiritual and magic. Tourists snapped off dozens of photographs and tried to capture it—the wet, spiritual monotony—before they climbed back into their rental cars and drove away to the next reservation on their itineraries.

The tourists didn’t know, and never would have guessed, that the reservation’s monotony might last for months, sometimes years, before one man would eventually pull a pistol from a secret place and shoot another man in the face, or before a group of women would drag another woman out of her house and beat her left eye clean out of her skull. After that first act of violence, rival families would issue calls for revenge and organize the retaliatory beatings. Afterward, three or four people would wash the blood from their hands and hide in the hills, causing white men to write editorials, all of this news immediately followed by capture, trial, verdict, and bus ride to prison. And then, only then, would the long silence, the monotony, resume.

Walking through the Missoula airport, Low Man wondered if the Flathead Reservation was a dangerous place, if it was a small country where the king established a new set of laws with every sunrise.

Carrying a suitcase and computer bag, Low Man searched for Carlotta’s face, her round, purple-dark face, in the crowd of people—most of them white men in cowboy hats—who waited at the gate. Instead, he saw an old Indian man holding a hardcover novel above his head.

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