Nothing But Net

“What is an Indian?” Sherman Alexie asks in his latest collection of stories, “The Toughest Indian in the World.” Is it the college student of the story “One Good Man,” who boasts of long black hair and skin dark as a pecan? “I’d grown up on my reservation with my tribe. I understood most of the Spokane language, though I’d always spoken it like a Jesuit priest. Hell, I’d been in three car wrecks! And most importantly, every member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians could tell you the exact place and time where I’d lost my virginity.”

What is an Indian? Is it the hitchhiker picked up by the Camry-driving narrator of “The Toughest Indian in the World,” an Indian fighter whose “fingers were twisted into weird, permanent shapes, and his knuckles were covered with layers of scar tissue,” a tough guy who crawls into a motel bed with the narrator, another Indian, to stroke and rub in the dead of night? Or, in the best American tradition of Whitman and Dickinson, “is it a boy who can sing the body electric or a woman who could not stop for death?”

For that matter, what is a white person? “They’ll kill you if they get the chance,” the father of the Camry driver says. “Love you or hate you, white people will shoot you in the heart. Even after all these years, they’ll still smell the salmon on you, the dead salmon, and that will make white people dangerous.”

The America of Alexie (a Spokane-Coeur d’Alene Indian himself), which he has peopled so well in his novels, poetry and stories, is full of Indians and white people and all the admixtures that our Cherokee-Chinese-Choctaw-Seminole -Semitic-Irish-Russian hyphenated country can stand. Indians are people in motion: the restless Indian woman of “Assimilation” who wants to sleep with a white man who isn’t her husband and the restless Indian man of “Class” who wants to sleep with an Indian woman before he marries white; the Camry driver who abandons his car the morning after his encounter with the hitchhiking fighter: “I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day’s sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die. At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon.”

Shot in the heart, by white people or by their fellow Indians, Alexie’s heroes leak salmon from their ventricles and roe from their pores. They are angry, sometimes with a brave anger, sometimes with a stupid anger. At the center of the collection is a story called “The Sin Eaters,” a modern holocaust of a nightmare about the eradication of the American Indian, as angry and powerful as any chapter of Jerzy Kosinski, in which full-blooded Indians are taken away for unexplained experiments in the inferno of the American Southwest.

Nevertheless, there is something hopeful in Alexie, certainly something hopeful about the ending of the title story, as the narrator abandons the Camry for the walk upriver, home. Break open the heart of that hope and you’ll find poetry. Break open the poetry and you’ll find a quiet acceptance that covers the pain like the layers of scar tissue on the fighter’s hands.

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The genius of Alexie’s writing is his ability to wrap language and image around the root of this anger and pain, by recognizing it as the human need for love. Take Seymour, the middle-aged hero of “South by Southwest,” who steals a pistol and holds up an International House of Pancakes in Spokane, Wash. “I aim to go on a nonviolent killing spree,” Seymour declares to the cowering patrons, “and I need somebody who will fall in love with me along the way.” Optimistically, a fat Indian raises his hand and volunteers. “You’re an Indian, ain’t you?” Seymour asks. “Yes, I am, yes, I am. Do you have a problem with that?” the fat man answers. “Only if you’re one of those buffalo hunters. I can’t have a nomad in my car. You just can’t trust a nomad.” “I come from a salmon tribe,” said the fat Indian, “and therefore, I am a dependable man.”

Optimism, in fact, is Alexie’s strong suit, the American beauty that seduces all his heroes. The loveliest story in the collection, “Saint Junior,” halos one Roman Gabriel Fury and his Chinese-Indian wife with a gorgeous moment of grace. Roman is a high school basketball star and a smart kid. Entrance to college leads him off the reservation and straight to Grace, the only other Indian at St. Jerome the Second University and the only person to score higher on tests designed to keep Indians out of college--higher in fact than anyone has ever scored before. Marriage to Grace leads to a career traveling around Europe, playing basketball and running from America. “Given the choice, he’d rather have been a buffalo hunter and soldier killer than the point guard for the Lakers, but there was no such choice, of course. He couldn’t be an indigenous warrior or a Los Angeles Laker. He was an Indian man who’d invented a new tradition for himself, a manhood ceremony that had usually provided him with equal amounts of joy and pain, but his ceremony had slowly and surely become archaic.”

And then one day, in the Madrid Hilton, Grace says, “Let’s go home.” And so these two prodigal Indians return to the Spokane Reservation, he to coach high school basketball, she to grow fat. And yet, one winter morning, when Roman goes outside with a can of kerosene to burn the snow off his driveway and shoot a few hoops, Grace approaches him, wearing only an overcoat. She opens “her coat to flash her nudity at Roman. Flesh and folds of flesh. Brown skin and seventeen moles. . . . ‘You make the next shot and you can have all of this,’ she said.” And in that moment, Roman shoots, and the ball, on the way to the hoop, through the instrument of kerosene or magic, catches fire. Whether one calls it Grace, or Ceremony, as Alexie does, that flaming basketball can’t help but warm all readers on its way to the hoop, Indians all of us.