The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (7 page)

“I have this dream about playing bingo,” she said. “It’s a million-dollar blackout and I only need B-6. But the caller announces B-7 and everyone else in the whole damn place is yelling out,
Bingo!
”

“Sounds more like the truth to me,” he said as she reached across him and turned on the light.

Victor was surprised. She had grown. She was the most enormous woman he had ever seen. Her hair fell down over her body, an explosion of horses. She was more beautiful than he wanted, more of a child of freeway exits and cable television, a mother to the children who waited outside 7-11 asking him to buy them a case of Coors Light. She sat on the bus traveling uptown to a community college. She sat on the bus traveling toward cities that grew, doubled. There was nothing he could give her father to earn her hand, nothing she would understand, remember.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, reaching for the light again, but he stopped her, held her wrist tightly, painfully.

“Why don’t you have any scars?” he asked, pulling her face close to his, her braids touching his chest.

“Why do you have so fucking many?” she asked him.

Then she was afraid of the man naked beside her, under her, afraid of that man who was simple in clothes and cowboy boots, a feather in a bottle.

“You’re nothing important,” he said. “You’re just another goddamned Indian like me.”

“Wrong,” she said, twisting from his grip and sitting up, her arms crossed over her chest. “I’m the best kind of Indian and I’m in bed with my father.”

He laughed. She was silent. She thought she could be saved. She thought he could take her hand and owldance her around the circle. She thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect with each step. She thought he was Crazy Horse.

He got up, pulled on his Levi’s, buttoned his red-and-black flannel shirt, the kind some writer called an Indian shirt. He stepped into his cowboy boots, opened the tiny refrigerator, and grabbed a beer.

“You’re nothing. You’re nothing,” he said and left.

Standing in the dark, next to a tipi with blue smoke escaping from the fire inside, he watched the Winnebago. For hours, Victor watched the lights go on and off, on and off. He wished he was Crazy Horse.

“G
O AHEAD,” ADRIAN SAID
. “Pull the trigger.”

I held a pistol to my temple. I was sober but wished I was drunk enough to pull the trigger.

“Go for it,” Adrian said. “You chickenshit.”

While I still held that pistol to my temple, I used my other hand to flip Adrian off. Then I made a fist with my third hand to gather a little bit of courage or stupidity, and wiped sweat from my forehead with my fourth hand.

“Here,” Adrian said. “Give me the damn thing.” Adrian took the pistol, put the barrel in his mouth, smiled around the metal, and pulled the trigger. Then he cussed wildly, laughed, and spit out the BB.

“Are you dead yet?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “Not yet. Give me another beer.”

“Hey, we don’t drink no more, remember? How about a Diet Pepsi?”

“That’s right, enit? I forgot. Give me a Pepsi.”

Adrian and I sat on the porch and watched the reservation. Nothing happened. From our chairs made rockers by unsteady legs, we could see that the only traffic signal on the reservation had stopped working.

“Hey, Victor,” Adrian asked. “Now when did that thing quit flashing?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

It was summer. Hot. But we kept our shirts on to hide our beer bellies and chicken-pox scars. At least, I wanted to hide my beer belly. I was a former basketball star fallen out of shape. It’s always kind of sad when that happens. There’s nothing more unattractive than a vain man, and that goes double for an Indian man.

“So,” Adrian asked. “What you want to do today?”

“Don’t know.”

We watched a group of Indian boys walk by. I’d like to think there were ten of them. But there were actually only four or five. They were skinny, darkened by sun, their hair long and wild. None of them looked like they had showered for a week.

Their smell made me jealous.

They were off to cause trouble somewhere, I’m sure. Little warriors looking for honor in some twentieth-century vandalism. Throw a few rocks through windows, kick a dog, slash a tire. Run like hell when the tribal cops drove slowly by the scene of the crime.

“Hey,” Adrian asked. “Isn’t that the Windmaker boy?”

“Yeah,” I said and watched Adrian lean forward to study Julius Windmaker, the best basketball player on the reservation, even though he was only fifteen years old.

“He looks good,” Adrian said.

“Yeah, he must not be drinking.”

“Yet.”

“Yeah, yet.”

Julius Windmaker was the latest in a long line of reservation basketball heroes, going all the way back to Aristotle Polatkin, who was shooting jumpshots exactly one year before James Naismith supposedly invented basketball.

I’d only seen Julius play a few times, but he had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddamn medicine man. One time, when the tribal school traveled to Spokane to play this white high school team, Julius scored sixty-seven points and the Indians won by forty.

“I didn’t know they’d be riding horses,” I heard the coach of the white team say when I was leaving.

I mean, Julius was an artist, moody. A couple times he walked right off the court during the middle of a game because there wasn’t enough competition. That’s how he was. Julius could throw a crazy pass, surprise us all, and send it out of bounds. But nobody called it a turnover because we all knew that one of his teammates should’ve been there to catch the pass. We loved him.

“Hey, Julius,” Adrian yelled from the porch. “You ain’t shit.”

Julius and his friends laughed, flipped us off, and shook their tail feathers a little as they kept walking down the road. They all knew Julius was the best ballplayer on the reservation these days, maybe the best ever, and they knew Adrian was just confirming that fact.

It was easier for Adrian to tease Julius because he never really played basketball. He was more detached about the whole thing. But I used to be quite a ballplayer. Maybe not as good as some, certainly not as good as Julius, but I still felt that ache in my bones, that need to be better than everyone else. It’s that need to be the best, that feeling of immortality, that drives a ballplayer. And when it disappears, for whatever reason, that ballplayer is never the same person, on or off the court.

I know when I lost it, that edge. During my senior year in high school we made it to the state finals. I’d been playing like crazy, hitting everything. It was like throwing rocks into the ocean from a little rowboat. I couldn’t miss. Then, right before the championship game, we had our pregame meeting in the first-aid room of the college where the tournament was held every year.

It took a while for our coach to show up so we spent the time looking at these first-aid manuals. These books had all kinds of horrible injuries. Hands and feet smashed flat in printing presses, torn apart by lawnmowers, burned and dismembered. Faces that had gone through windshields, dragged over gravel, split open by garden tools. The stuff was disgusting, but we kept looking, flipping through photograph after photograph, trading books, until we all wanted to throw up.

While I looked at those close-ups of death and destruction, I lost it. I think everybody in that room, everybody on the team, lost that feeling of immortality. We went out and lost the championship game by twenty points. I missed every shot I took. I missed everything.

“So,” I asked Adrian. “You think Julius will make it all the way?”

“Maybe, maybe.”

There’s a definite history of reservation heroes who never finish high school, who never finish basketball seasons. Hell, there’s been one or two guys who played just a few minutes of one game, just enough to show what they could have been. And there’s the famous case of Silas Sirius, who made one move and scored one basket in his entire basketball career. People still talk about it.

“Hey,” I asked Adrian. “Remember Silas Sirius?”

“Hell,” Adrian said. “Do I remember? I was there when he grabbed that defensive rebound, took a step, and flew the length of the court, did a full spin in midair, and then dunked that fucking ball. And I don’t mean it looked like he flew, or it was so beautiful it was almost like he flew. I mean, he flew, period.”

I laughed, slapped my legs, and knew that I believed Adrian’s story more as it sounded less true.

“Shit,” he continued. “And he didn’t grow no wings. He just kicked his legs a little. Held that ball like a baby in his hand. And he was smiling. Really. Smiling when he flew. Smiling when he dunked it, smiling when he walked off the court and never came back. Hell, he was still smiling ten years after that.”

I laughed some more, quit for a second, then laughed a little longer because it was the right thing to do.

“Yeah,” I said. “Silas was a ballplayer.”

“Real ballplayer,” Adrian agreed.

In the outside world, a person can be a hero one second and a nobody the next. Think about it. Do white people remember the names of those guys who dove into that icy river to rescue passengers from that plane wreck a few years back? Hell, white people don’t even remember the names of the dogs who save entire families from burning up in house fires by barking. And, to be honest, I don’t remember none of those names either, but a reservation hero is remembered. A reservation hero is a hero forever. In fact, their status grows over the years as the stories are told and retold.

“Yeah,” Adrian said. “It’s too bad that damn diabetes got him. Silas was always talking about a comeback.”

“Too bad, too bad.”

We both leaned further back into our chairs. Silence. We watched the grass grow, the rivers flow, the winds blow.

“Damn,” Adrian asked. “When did that fucking traffic signal quit working?”

“Don’t know.”

“Shit, they better fix it. Might cause an accident.”

We both looked at each other, looked at the traffic signal, knew that about only one car an hour passed by, and laughed our asses off. Laughed so hard that when we tried to rearrange ourselves, Adrian ended up with my ass and I ended up with his. That looked so funny that we laughed them off again and it took us most of an hour to get them back right again.

Then we heard glass breaking in the distance.

“Sounds like beer bottles,” Adrian said.

“Yeah, Coors Light, I think.”

“Bottled 1988.”

We started to laugh, but a tribal cop drove by and cruised down the road where Julius and his friends had walked earlier.

“Think they’ll catch them?” I asked Adrian.

“Always do.”

After a few minutes, the tribal cop drove by again, with Julius in the backseat and his friends running behind.

“Hey,” Adrian asked. “What did he do?”

“Threw a brick through a BIA pickup’s windshield,” one of the Indian boys yelled back.

“Told you it sounded like a pickup window,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, a 1982 Chevy.”

“With red paint.”

“No, blue.”

We laughed for just a second. Then Adrian sighed long and deep. He rubbed his head, ran his fingers through his hair, scratched his scalp hard.

“I think Julius is going to go bad,” he said.

“No way,” I said. “He’s just horsing around.”

“Maybe, maybe.”

It’s hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don’t wonder if it’s half filled or half empty. They just hope it’s good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.

And, just like everybody else, Indians need heroes to help them learn how to survive. But what happens when our heroes don’t even know how to pay their bills?

“Shit, Adrian,” I said. “He’s just a kid.”

“Ain’t no children on a reservation.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before. Well,” I said. “I guess that Julius is pretty good in school, too.”

“And?”

“And he wants to maybe go to college.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I said and laughed. And I laughed because half of me was happy and half of me wasn’t sure what else to do.

A year later, Adrian and I sat on the same porch in the same chairs. We’d done things in between, like ate and slept and read the newspaper. It was another hot summer. Then again, summer is supposed to be hot.

“I’m thirsty,” Adrian said. “Give me a beer.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? We don’t drink anymore.”

“Shit,” Adrian said. “I keep forgetting. Give me a goddamn Pepsi.”

“That’s a whole case for you today already.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck these substitute addictions.”

We sat there for a few minutes, hours, and then Julius Windmaker staggered down the road.

“Oh, look at that,” Adrian said. “Not even two in the afternoon and he’s drunk as a skunk.”

“Don’t he have a game tonight?”

“Yeah, he does.”

“Well, I hope he sobers up in time.”

“Me, too.”

I’d only played one game drunk and it was in an all-Indian basketball tournament after I got out of high school. I’d been drinking the night before and woke up feeling kind of sick, so I got drunk again. Then I went out and played a game. I felt disconnected the whole time. Nothing seemed to fit right. Even my shoes, which had fit perfectly before, felt too big for my feet. I couldn’t even see the basketball or basket clearly. They were more like ideas. I mean, I knew where they were generally supposed to be, so I guessed at where I should be. Somehow or another, I scored ten points.

“He’s been drinking quite a bit, enit?” Adrian asked.

“Yeah, I hear he’s even been drinking Sterno.”

“Shit, that’ll kill his brain quicker than shit.”

Adrian and I left the porch that night and went to the tribal school to watch Julius play. He still looked good in his uniform, although he was a little puffy around the edges. But he just wasn’t the ballplayer we all remembered or expected. He missed shots, traveled, threw dumb passes that we all knew were dumb passes. By the fourth quarter, Julius sat at the end of the bench, hanging his head, and the crowd filed out, all talking about which of the younger players looked good. We talked about some kid named Lucy in the third grade who already had a nice move or two.