Flight Patterns
Sherman Alexie grew up with his four siblings on a reservation near Spokane, Washington, an experience he once described as the “origin” of “everything I do now, writing and otherwise.” After attending high school in nearby Reardan, where he was the only Native American other than the school mascot, he earned a BA in American Studies from Washington State University and soon after published the fi rst of over twelve collections of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing (1991). Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, it also earned high praise from the New York Times Book Review, which hailed its twenty-six- year- old author as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Yet Alexie is perhaps better understood as an accomplished storyteller in verse and prose. His fi rst collection of fi ction, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfi ght in Heaven (1993), received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book, which Alexie followed up over fi fteen years later with a PEN/Faulkner Award for his fourth collection, War Dances (2010). In between have come novels— including Reservation Blues (1995), Flight (2007), and the National Book Award– winning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian (2009)— as well as radio scripts and screenplays: Smoke Signals (1998) was featured at the Sundance Film Festival. A sometime stand- up comedian and four- time champion of the World Heavyweight Poetry Slam, he lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and two sons. At 5:05 a.m., Patsy Cline fell loudly to pieces on William’s clock radio.1 He hit the snooze button, silencing lonesome Patsy, and dozed for fi fteen more minutes before Donna Fargo bragged about being the happiest girl in the whole USA. William wondered what had ever happened to Donna Fargo,2 whose birth name was the infi nitely more interesting Yvonne Vaughn, and wondered why he knew Donna Fargo’s birth name. Ah, he was the bemused and slightly embarrassed own er of a twenty- fi rst- century American mind. His intellect was a big comfy couch stuffed with sacred and profane trivia. He knew the names of all nine of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands and could quote from memory the entire Declaration of In de pen dence. William knew Donna Fargo’s birth name because he wanted to know her birth name. He wanted to know all of the great big and tiny little American details. He didn’t want to choose between Ernie Hemingway and the Spokane tribal elders, between Mia Hamm and Crazy Horse, between The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Chief Dan George. William wanted all of it. Hunger was his crime. As for dear Miss Fargo, William fi gured she probably played the Indian casino circuit along with the Righ teous Brothers, Smokey Robinson, Eddie Money, Pat Benatar, RATT, REO Speedwagon, and
1. Reference to country music singer Patsy Cline’s recording of “I Fall to Pieces” (1961). 2. American singer (b. 1949) best known for her recording of “Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” (1972).
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dozens of other formerly famous rock- and country- music stars. Many of the Indian casino acts w ere bad, and most of the rest were pure nostalgic entertainment, but a small number made beautiful and timeless music. William knew the genius Merle Haggard played thirty or forty Indian casinos every year, so long live Haggard and long live tribal economic sovereignty. Who cares about fi shing and hunting rights? Who cares about uranium mines and nuclear- waste- dump sites on sacred land? Who cares about the recovery of tribal languages? Give me Freddy Fender singing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” in En glish and Spanish to 206 Spokane Indians, William thought, and I will be a happy man. But William wasn’t happy this morning. He’d slept poorly— he always slept poorly— and wondered again if his insomnia was a physical or a mental condition. His doctor had offered him sleeping- pill prescriptions, but William declined for philosophical reasons. He was an Indian who didn’t smoke or drink or eat processed sugar. He lifted weights three days a week, ran every day, and competed in four triathlons a year. A two- mile swim, a 150- mile bike ride, and a full marathon. A triathlon was a religious quest. If Saint Francis were still around, he’d be a triathlete. Another exaggeration! Theological hyperbole! Rabid self- justifi cation! Diagnostically speaking, William was an obsessive- compulsive workaholic who was afraid of pills. So he suffered sleepless nights and constant daytime fatigue. This morning, awake and not awake, William turned down the radio, changing Yvonne Vaughn’s celebratory anthem into whispered blues, and rolled off the couch onto his hands and knees. His back and legs were sore because he’d slept on the living room couch so the alarm wouldn’t disturb his wife and daughter upstairs. Still on his hands and knees, William stretched his spine, using the twelve basic exercises he’d learned from Dr. Adams, that master practitioner of white middle- class chiropractic voodoo. This was all part of William’s regular morning ceremony. Other people fi nd God in ornate ritual, but William called out to Geronimo, Jesus Christ, Saint Therese, Buddha, Allah, Billie Holiday, Simon Ortiz, Abe Lincoln, Bessie Smith, Howard Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joan of Arc and Joan of Collins, John Woo, Wilma Mankiller, and Karl and Groucho Marx while he pumped out fi fty push- ups and fi fty abdominal crunches. William wasn’t particularly religious; he was generally religious. Finished with his morning calisthenics, William showered in the basement, suffering the water that was always too cold down there, and threaded his long black hair into two tight braids— the indigenous businessman’s tonsorial special— and dressed in his best travel suit, a navy three- button pinstripe he’d ordered online. He’d worried about the fi t, but his tailor was a magician and had only mildly chastised William for such an impulsive purchase. After knotting his blue paisley tie, purchased in person and on sale, William walked upstairs in bare feet and kissed his wife, Marie, good- bye. “Cancel your fl ight,” she said. “And come back to bed.” “You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said. She was a small and dark woman who seemed to be smaller and darker at that time of the morning. Her long black hair had once again defeated its braids, but she didn’t care. She sometimes went two or three days without brushing it. William was obsessive about his mane, tying and retying his ponytail, knotting and reknotting his braids, experimenting with this shampoo and that conditioner. He greased down his cowlicks (inherited from a cowlicked father and grandfather) with shiny pomade, but Marie’s hair was always unkempt, wild,
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and renegade. William’s hair hung around the fort, but Marie’s rode on the warpath! She constantly pulled stray strands out of her mouth. William loved her for it. During sex, they spent as much time readjusting her hair as they did readjusting positions. Such were the erotic dangers of loving a Spokane Indian woman. “Take off your clothes and get in bed,” Marie pleaded now. “I can’t do that,” William said. “They’re counting on me.” “Oh, the plane will be fi lled with salesmen. Let some other salesman sell what you’re selling.” “Your breath stinks.” “So do my feet, my pits, and my butt, but you still love me. Come back to bed, and I’ll make it worth your while.” William kissed Marie, reached beneath her pajama top, and squeezed her breasts. He thought about reaching inside her pajama bottoms. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to wrestle him into bed. Oh, God, he wanted to climb into bed and make love. He wanted to fornicate, to sex, to breed, to screw, to make the beast with two backs. Oh, sweetheart, be my little synonym! He wanted her to be both subject and object. Perhaps it was wrong (and unavoidable) to objectify female strangers, but shouldn’t every husband seek to objectify his wife at least once a day? William loved and respected his wife, and delighted in her intelligence, humor, and kindness, but he also loved to watch her lovely ass when she walked, and stare down the front of her loose shirts when she leaned over, and grab her breasts at wildly inappropriate times— during dinner parties and piano recitals and uncontrolled intersections, for instance. He constantly made passes at her, not necessarily expecting to be successful, but to remind her he still desired her and was excited by the thought of her. She was his passive and active. “Come on,” she said. “If you stay home, I’ll make you Scooby.” He laughed at the inside joke, created one night while he tried to give her sexual directions and was so aroused that he sounded exactly like Scooby- Doo. “Stay home, stay home, stay home,” she chanted and wrapped herself tighter around him. He was supporting all of her weight, holding her two feet off the bed. “I’m not strong enough to do this,” he said. “Baby, baby, I’ll make you strong,” she sang, and it sounded like she was writing a Top 40 hit in the Brill Building, circa 1962. How could he leave a woman who sang like that? He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender- sensitivity workshops! He pulled away from her, dropping her back onto the bed, and stepped away. “Willy Loman,” she said, “you must pay attention to me.”3 “I love you,” he said, but she’d already fallen back to sleep— a narcoleptic gift William envied— and he wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to cook and wash dishes. William tiptoed into his daughter’s bedroom, expecting to hear her light snore, but she was awake and sitting up in bed, and looked so magical and
3. Protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949); Willy’s wife, Linda, says of her husband, “Attention, attention must fi nally be paid to such a person.”
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androgynous with her huge brown eyes and crew- cut hair. She’d wanted to completely shave her head: I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook. “Daddy,” she said. “Grace,” he said. “You should be asleep. You have school today.” “I know,” she said. “But I wanted to see you before you left.” “Okay,” said William as he kissed her forehead, nose, and chin. “You’ve seen me. Now go back to sleep. I love you and I’m going to miss you.” She fi ercely hugged him. “Oh,” he said. “You’re such a lovely, lovely girl.” Preternaturally serious, she took his face in her eyes and studied his eyes. Morally examined by a kindergartner! “Daddy,” she said. “Go be silly for those people far away.” She cried as William left her room. Already quite sure he was only an adequate husband, he wondered, as he often did, if he was a bad father. During these mornings, he felt generic and violent, like some caveman leaving the fi re to hunt animals in the cold and dark. Maybe his hands were smooth and clean, but they felt bloody. Downstairs, he put on his socks and shoes and overcoat and listened for his daughter’s crying, but she was quiet, having inherited her mother’s gift for instant sleep. She had probably fallen back into one of her odd little dreams. While he was gone, she often drew pictures of those dreams, coloring the sky green and the grass blue— everything backward and wrong— and had once sketched a man in a suit crashing an airplane into the bright yellow sun. Ah, the rage, fear, and loneliness of a fi ve- year- old, simple and true! She’d been especially afraid since September 11 of the previous year4 and constantly quizzed William about what he would do if terrorists hijacked his plane. “I’d tell them I was your father,” he’d said to her before he left for his last business trip. “And they’d stop being bad.” “You’re lying,” she’d said. “I’m not supposed to listen to liars. If you lie to me, I can’t love you.” He couldn’t argue with her logic. Maybe she was the most logical person on the planet. Maybe she should be illegally elected president of the United States. William understood her fear of fl ying and of his fl ight. He was afraid of fl ying, too, but not of terrorists. After the horrible violence of September 11, he fi gured hijacking was no longer a useful weapon in the terrorist arsenal. These days, a terrorist armed with a box cutter would be torn to pieces by all of the coach- class passengers and fed to the fi rst- class upgrades. However, no matter how much he tried to laugh his fear away, William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffi ng around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deodorant, and sarcasm. Still, he understood why people
were afraid of him, a brown- skinned man with dark hair and eyes. If Norwegian
4. That is, September 11, 2001, when hijacked planes were fl own into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands.
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terrorists had exploded the World Trade Center, then blue- eyed blondes would be viewed with more suspicion. Or so he hoped.
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