The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie Page A

Indian grandmother who designs them, each an original, before she sells them for a standard operating fee. He remembered the redheaded bank teller who cashed his check and asked him if he thought her shirt was authentic. Authentic. He stared at this small Indian woman standing in his way and walked past her.
    “Hey, One-Braid,” she called after him. “Too good for me?”
    “No,” he said. “Too big.”
    He walked away, through the sawchips spread over the ground to keep the dust down, down to the stickgame pavilion. He was surprised to see Willie Boyd holding the bones, making gas money for the ride to the next powwow. He dug into his pockets, found a five-dollar bill, and threw it in with Willie. Willie shifted the bones from hand to hand, a Native magician working without mirrors, his hand an inch quicker than the eyes of the old woman sitting on the other side, trying to find the bone with the colored band. The old woman laughed when she guessed wrong, threw a few crumpled bills into the dirt in front of Willie.
    “Let it ride all night, Willie,” Victor said. “I ain’t going nowhere.”
    It was only the first night of the powwow, everyone had money in their pockets. A five-dollar bill couldn’t mean a thing until the end, when the last van heading out of Browning or Poplar had room for only one more. Willie Boyd drove an RV with a television and a refrigerator, with a sunroof that took in all the air. When it mattered, Victor thought, Willie Boyd would remember that five dollars. Willie Boyd always remembered.
    She was standing behind him, again, when he turned to leave.
    “You must be a rich man,” she said. “Not much of a warrior, though. You keep letting me sneak up on you.”
    “You don’t surprise me,” he said. “The Plains Indians had women who rode their horses eighteen hours a day. They could shoot seven arrows consecutively, have them all in the air at the same time. They were the best light cavalry in the history of the world.”
    “Just my luck,” she said. “An educated Indian.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Reservation University.”
    They both laughed at the old joke. Every Indian is an alumnus.
    “Where you from?” she asked.
    “Wellpinit,” he said. “I’m a Spokane.”
    “I should’ve known. You got those fisherman’s hands.”
    “Ain’t no salmon left in our river. Just a school bus and a few hundred basketballs.”
    “What the hell you talking about?”
    “Our basketball team drives into the river and drowns every year,” he said. “It’s tradition.”
    She laughed. “You’re just a storyteller, ain’t you?”
    “I’m just telling you things before they happen,” he said. “The same things sons and daughters will tell your mothers and fathers.”
    “Do you ever answer a question straight?”
    “Depends on the question,” he said.
    “Do you want to be my powwow paradise?”
    She took him back to her Winnebago. In the dark, on the plastic mattress, she touched his soft belly. His hands moved over her, fancydancers, each going farther away from his body. He was shaking.
    “What are you scared of?” she asked.
    “Elevators, escalators, revolving doors. Any kind of forced movement.”
    “You don’t have to worry about those kind of things at a powwow.”
    “That’s not true,” he said. “We had an Indian conference at the Sheraton Hotel in Spokane last winter. About twenty of us crowded into an elevator to go up to my room and we got stuck between the twelfth and fourteenth floors. Twenty Indians and a little old white elevator man having a heart attack.”
    “You’re lying,” she said. “You stole that story.”
    “What scares you?” he asked. She was quiet. She stared hard at him, trying to find his features among the shadows, formed a picture of him in her mind. But she was wrong. His hair was thinner, more brown than black. His hands were small. Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse.
    “I have this dream about playing bingo,” she