The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie

than her dead eye. She wasn’t literally blind, of course. She’d just stopped seeing me. I was startled by the sudden epiphany that she’d been faking her orgasms all along, certainly since our child had died, and probably since the first time we’d made love.
    “What?” she asked, a huge question to ask and answer at any time in our lives. Her hands never left their usual place at the small of my back.
    “I’m sorry,” I told her, and I was sorry, and left her naked and alone in bed while I quickly dressed and went out for a drink.
    I don’t drink alcohol, never have, mostly because I don’t want to maintain and confirm any of my ethnic stereotypes, let alone the most prevalent one, but also because my long-lost father, a half-breed, is still missing somewhere in the bottom of a tequila bottle. I had always wondered if he was a drunk because he was Indian or because he was white or because he was both.
    Personally, I like bottled water, with gas, as the Europeans like to say. If I drink enough of that bubbly water in the right environment, I can get drunk. After a long night of Perrier or Pellegrino, I can still wake up with a vicious hangover. Obviously, I place entirely too much faith in the power of metaphor.
    When I went out carousing with my fellow lawyers, I ended up in fancy hotel lounges, private clubs, and golf course cigar rooms, the places where the alcoholics adhere to a rigid dress code, but after leaving my marriage bed I wanted to drink in a place free from lawyers and their dress codes, from emotional obligations and beautiful white women, even the kind of white woman who might be the tenth most attractive in any room in the world.
    I chose Chuck’s, a dive near the corner of Virginia and First.
    I’d driven by the place any number of times, had seen the Indians who loitered outside. I assumed it was an Indian bar, one of those establishments where the clientele, through chance and design, is mostly indigenous. I’d heard about these kinds of places. They are supposed to exist in every city.
    “What can I get you?” asked the bartender when I sat on the stool closest to the door. She was an Indian woman with scars on her face and knuckles. A fighter. She was a woman who had once been pretty but had grown up in a place where pretty was punished. Now, twenty pounds overweight, on her way to forty pounds more, she was most likely saving money for a complete move to a city yet to be determined.
    “Hey, handsome,” she asked again as I stared blankly at her oft-broken nose. I decided that her face resembled most of the furniture in the bar: dark, stained by unknown insults, and in a continual state of repair. “What the fuck would you like to drink?”
    “Water,” I said, surprised that the word “fuck” could sound so friendly.
    “Water?”
    “Yeah, water.”
    She filled a glass from the tap behind her and plunked it down in front of me.
    “A dollar,” she said.
    “For tap water?”
    “For space rental.”
    I handed her a five-dollar bill.
    “Keep the change,” I said and took a big drink.
    “Cool. Next time, you get a clean glass,” she said and waited for my reaction.
    I swallowed hard, kept my dinner down, and smiled.
    “I don’t need to know what’s coming next,” I said. “I like mysteries.”
    “What kind of mysteries?”
    “Hard-boiled. The kind where the dog gets run over, the hero gets punched in the head, and the bad guy gets eaten by sharks.”
    “Not me,” she said. “I got too much blood in my life already. I like romances.”
    I wondered if she wanted to sleep with me.
    “You want something else,” she said, “just shout it out. I’ll hear you.”
    She moved to the other end of the bar where an old Indian man sipped at a cup of coffee. They talked and laughed. Surprisingly jealous of their camaraderie, I turned away and looked around the bar. It was a small place, maybe fifty feet long by twenty feet wide, with one pinball machine, one pool table, and