Ten Little Indians

261 Pages·2013·2.21 MB·English

by  Sherman Alexie

Ten Little Indians
Stories
Sherman Alexie
For Diane, Joseph, and David
For Christy
Contents
The Search Engine
Lawyer’s League
Can I Get a Witness?
Do Not Go Gentle
Flight Patterns
The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above
Do You Know Where I Am?
What You Pawn I Will Redeem
What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?
A Biography of Sherman Alexie
Love—bittersweet, irrepressible—
loosens my limbs and I tremble.
—Sappho
The Search Engine
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON IN the student union café, Corliss looked up from her
American history textbook and watched a young man and younger woman walk
in together and sit two tables away. The student union wasn’t crowded, so
Corliss clearly heard the young couple’s conversation. He offered her coffee
from his thermos, but she declined. Hurt by her rejection, or feigning pain—he
always carried two cups because well, you never know, do you?—he poured
himself one, sipped and sighed with theatrical pleasure, and monologued. The
young woman slumped in her seat and listened. He told her where he was from
and where he wanted to go after college, and how much he liked these books and
those teachers but hated those movies and these classes, and it was all part of an
ordinary man’s list-making attempts to seduce an ordinary woman. Blond, blue-
eyed, pretty, and thin, she hid her incipient bulimia beneath a bulky wool
sweater. Corliss wanted to buy the skeletal woman a sandwich, ten sandwiches,
and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Eat, young woman, eat, Corliss thought, and
you will be redeemed! The young woman set her backpack on the table and
crossed her arms over her chest, but the young man didn’t seem to notice or care
about the defensive meaning of her body language. He talked and talked and
gestured passionately with long-fingered hands. A former lover, an older
woman, had probably told him his hands were artistic, so he assumed all women
would be similarly charmed. He wore his long blond hair pulled back into a
ponytail and a flowered blue shirt that was really a blouse; he was narcissistic,
androgynous, lovely, and yes, charming. Corliss thought she might sleep with
him if he took her home to a clean apartment, but she decided to hate him
instead. She knew she judged people based on their surface appearances, but
Lord Byron said only shallow people don’t judge by surfaces. So Corliss thought
of herself as Byronesque as she eavesdropped on the young couple. She hoped
one of these ordinary people might say something interesting and original. She
believed in the endless nature of human possibility. She would be delighted if
these two messy humans transcended their stereotypes and revealed themselves
as mortal angels.
“Well, you know,” the young man said to the young woman, “it was Auden
who wrote that no poem ever saved a Jew from the ovens.”
“Oh,” the young woman said. She didn’t know why he’d abruptly
paraphrased Auden. She wasn’t sure who this Auden person was, or why his
opinions about poetry should matter to her, or why poetry itself was so
important. She knew this coffee-drinking guy wanted to have sex with her, and
she was considering it, but he wasn’t improving his chances by making her feel
stupid.
Corliss was confused by the poetic non sequitur as well. She thought he
might be trying to prove how many books he’d skimmed. Maybe he deserved
her contempt, but Corliss realized that very few young men read poetry at
Washington State University. And how many of those boys quoted, or
misquoted, the poems they’d read? Twenty, ten, less than five? This longhaired
guy enjoyed a monopoly on the poetry-quoting market in the southeastern corner
of Washington, and he knew it. Corliss had read a few poems by W. H. Auden
but couldn’t remember any of them other than the elegy recited in that Hugh
Grant romantic comedy. She figured the young man had memorized the first
stanzas of thirty-three love poems and used them like propaganda to win the
hearts and minds of young women. He’d probably tattooed the opening lines of
Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” on his chest: “Had we but world
enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Corliss wondered if
Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets only because he was trying to get laid.
Which poet or poem has been quoted most often in the effort to get laid? Most
important, which poet or poem has been quoted most successfully in the effort to
get laid? Corliss needed to know the serious answers to her silly questions. Or
vice versa. So she gathered her books and papers and approached the couple.
“Excuse me,” Corliss said to the young man. “Was that W. H. Auden you
were quoting?”
“Yes,” he said. His smile was genuine and boyish. He had displayed his
intelligence and was being rewarded for it. Why shouldn’t he smile?
“I didn’t recognize the quote,” Corliss said. “Which poem did it come
from?”
The young man looked at Corliss and at the young woman. Corliss knew he
was choosing between them. The young woman knew it, too, and she decided
the whole thing was pointless.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, grabbed her backpack, and fled.
“Wow, that was quick,” he said. “Rejected at the speed of light.”
“Sorry about that,” Corliss said. But she was pleased with the young
woman’s quick decision and quicker flight. If she could resist one man’s efforts
to shape and determine her future, perhaps she could resist all future efforts.
“It’s all right,” the young man said. “Do you want to sit down, keep me
company?”
“No thanks,” Corliss said. “Tell me about that Auden quote.”
He smiled again. He studied her. She was very short, a few inches under
five feet, maybe thirty pounds overweight, and plain-featured. But her skin was
clear and dark brown (like good coffee!), and her long black hair hung down
past her waist. And she wore red cowboy boots, and her breasts were large, and
she knew about Auden, and she was confident enough to approach strangers, so
maybe her beauty was eccentric, even exotic. And exoticism was hard to find in
Pullman, Washington.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Corliss.”
“That’s a beautiful name. What does it mean?”
“It means Corliss is my name. Are you going to tell me where you read that
Auden quote or not?”
“You’re Indian, aren’t you?”
“Good-bye,” she said and stood to leave.
“Wait, wait,” he said. “You don’t like me, do you?”
“You’re cute and smart, and you’ve gotten everything you’ve ever asked
for, and that makes you lazy and dangerous.”
“Wow, you’re honest. Will you like me better if I’m honest?”
“I might.”
“I’ve never read Auden’s poems. Not much, anyway. I read some article
about him. They quoted him on the thing about Jews and poems. I don’t know
where they got it from. But it’s true, don’t you think?”
“What’s true?”
“A good gun will always beat a good poem.”
“I hope not,” Corliss said and walked away.
Back in Spokane, Washington, Corliss had attended Spokane River High School,
which had contained a mirage-library. Sure, the books had looked like Dickens
and Dickinson from a distance, but they turned into cookbooks and auto-repair
manuals when you picked them up. As a poor kid, and a middle-class Indian, she
seemed destined for a minimum-wage life of waiting tables or changing oil. But
she had wanted a maximum life, an original aboriginal life, so she had fought her
way out of her underfunded public high school into an underfunded public
college. So maybe, despite American racism, sexism, and classism, Corliss’s
biography confirmed everything nearly wonderful and partially meritorious
about her country. Ever the rugged individual, she had collected aluminum cans
during the summer before her junior year of high school so she could afford the
yearlong SAT-prep course that had astronomically raised her scores and won her
a dozen academic scholarships. At the beginning of every semester, Corliss had
called the history and English teachers at the local prep school she couldn’t
afford, and asked what books they would be reading in class, and she had found
those books and lived with them like siblings. And those same teachers, good
white people whose whiteness and goodness blended and separated, had faxed
her study guides and copies of the best student papers. Two of those teachers,
without having met Corliss in person, had sent her graduation gifts of money and
yet more books. She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who
stole a rich education from white people and kept it.
In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest,
Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate
relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much
magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to
read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its
exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be
buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.
She found W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems on a shelf above her head. She
stood on her toes and pulled down the thick volume, but she also pulled out
another book that dropped to the floor. It was a book of poems titled In the
Reservation of My Mind, by Harlan Atwater. According to the author’s
biography on the back cover, Harlan Atwater was a Spokane Indian, but Corliss
had never heard of the guy. Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents
were all born and raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation. And the rest of her
ancestors, going back a dozen generations, were born and raised on the land that
would eventually be called the Spokane Indian Reservation. Her one white
ancestor, a Russian fur trapper, had been legally adopted into the tribe, given
some corny Indian name she didn’t like to repeat, and served on the tribal
council for ten years. Corliss was a Spokane Indian born in Sacred Heart
Hospital, only a mile from the Spokane River Falls, the heart of the Spokane
Tribe, and had grown up in the city of Spokane, which was really an annex of
the reservation, and thought she knew or knew of every Spokane.
Demographically and biologically speaking, Corliss was about as Spokane as a
Spokane Indian can be, and only three thousand other Spokanes of various
Spokane-ness existed in the whole world, so how had this guy escaped her
attention? She opened the book and read the first poem: