War Dances by Sherman Alexie

ever received.
    I wanted to call up my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful. But I couldn’t tell him anything. He was dead. I told my wife and sons that I was okay. I told my mother and siblings. I told my friends. But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father would have. I miss him, the drunk bastard. I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me.

“The Theology of Reptiles”
    We found a snake, dead in midmolt.
    “It’s almost like two snakes,” I said.
    My brother grabbed it by the head
    And said, “It just needs lightning bolts.”
    Laughing, he jumped the creek and draped
    The snake over an electric fence.
    Was my brother being cruel? Yes,
    But we were shocked when that damn snake
    Spiraled off the wire and splayed,
    Alive, on the grass, made a fist
    Of itself, then, gorgeous and pissed,
    Uncurled, stood on end, and swayed
    For my brother, who, bemused and odd,
    Had somehow become one snake’s god.

Catechism
    Why did your big brother, during one hot summer, sleep in the hallway closet?
    My mother, a Spokane Indian, kept bags of fabric scraps in that hallway closet. My brother arranged these scrap bags into shapes that approximated a mattress and pillows. My mother used these scraps to make quilts.
    As an Indian, were you taught to worship the sun or the moon?
    My mother was (and is) a Protestant of random varieties. My late father, a Coeur d’Alene, was a Catholic until the day that he decided to become an atheist. But it wasn’t until twelve years after he decided to become an atheist that he made this information public.
    MY MOTHER : “Why did you wait so long to tell us?”
    MY FATHER : “I didn’t want to make a quick decision.”
    Do you think that religious ceremony is an effective treatment for grief?
    My mother once made a quilt from dozens of pairs of second- and third- and fourth-hand blue jeans that she bought at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Value Village, and garage sales. My late sister studied my mother’s denim quilt and said, “That’s a lot of pants. There’s been a lot of ass in those pants. This is a blanket of asses.”
    If your reservation is surrounded on all sides by two rivers and a creek, doesn’t that make it an island?
    A Coeur d’Alene Indian holy man—on my father’s side—received this vision: Three crows, luminescent and black, except for collars of white feathers, perched in a pine tree above my ancestor’s camp and told him that three strangers would soon be arriving and their advice must be heeded or the Coeur d’Alene would vanish from the earth. The next day, the first Jesuits—three men in black robes with white collars—walked into a Coeur d’Alene Indian fishing camp.
    Do you believe that God, in the form of his son, Jesus Christ, once walked the Earth?
    Thus the Coeur d’Alene soon became, and remain, among the most Catholicized Indians in the country.
    Has any member of the clergy ever given you a clear and concise explanation of this Holy Ghost business?
    Therefore, nuns taught my father, as a child, to play classical piano.
    Do you think that Beethoven was not actually deaf and was just having a laugh at his family’s expense?
    By the time I was born, my father had long since stopped playing piano.
    ME : “Dad, what did the nuns teach you to play?”
    HIM : “I don’t want to talk about that shit.”
    After you catch a sliver from a wooden crucifix, how soon afterward will you gain superpowers?
    When he was drunk, my father would sit at the kitchen table and hum an indecipherable tune while playing an imaginary keyboard.
    Did your mother ever make a quilt that featured a real piano keyboard?
    I have mounted my father’s imaginary keyboard on my office wall.
    ME : “And, here, on the wall, is my favorite work of art.”
    GUEST : “I don’t see anything.”
    ME : “It’s an installation piece created by my father.”
    GUEST : “I still can’t see