The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS DANCE

VICTOR WAS DANCING WITH a Lakota woman in a Montana bar. He had no idea why he was there; he couldn’t even remember how he arrived. All he knew was that he was dancing with the one hundredth Indian woman in the one hundred dancing days since the white woman he loved had left him. This dancing was his compensation, his confession, largest sin, and penance.

“You’re beautiful,” he said to the Lakota woman.

“And you’re drunk,” she said. But she was beautiful, with hair and eyes so dark and long. He imagined she was a reservation eclipse. Full. He needed special glasses to look at her; he could barely survive her reflection.

“You’re a constellation,” he said.

“And you’re really drunk,” she said.

Then she was gone and he was laughing, dancing through the bar all by himself. He wanted to sing but he couldn’t think of any lyrics. He was drunk, bruised by whiskey, brutal. His hair was electricity.

“I started World War I,” he shouted. “I shot Lincoln.”

He was underwater drunk, staring up at the faces of his past. He recognized Neil Armstrong and Christopher Columbus, his mother and father, James Dean, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood. He staggered, fell against other dancers, found himself in the backseat of a Grasshopper as it traveled uneasily down reservation dirt roads.

“Where are we?” he asked the Flathead driver with insane braids.

“Heading back to Arlee, cousin. You said you wanted a ride.”

“Shit, all I wanted to do was dance.”

By the river. She was standing by the river. She was dancing without moving. By the river. She wasn’t beautiful exactly; she was like a shimmer in the distance. She was so white his reservation eyes suffered.

“Hey,” Victor asked. “Haven’t you ever heard of Custer?”

“Have you ever heard of Crazy Horse?” she asked him.

In his memory she was all kinds of colors, but the only one that really mattered was white. Then she was gone, and absence has no color. Sometimes he looked in the mirror, rubbed his face, pulled at his eyelids and skin. He combed his hair into braids and forgave himself. At night his legs ached and he reached down under the covers and touched his thighs, flexed muscles. He opened his eyes but all he could see in the dark was the digital clock on the milk carton beside the bed. It was late, early in the morning. He kept his eyes open until they grew accustomed to the dark, until he could see vague images of the bedroom. Then he looked at the clock again. Fifteen minutes had passed and it was closer to sunrise and he still hadn’t slept at all.

He measured insomnia by minutes. Ten minutes, he told himself. I’ll be asleep in ten minutes. If not, I’ll get up and turn on the light. Read a book maybe.

Ten minutes passed and he made more promises. It’s hopeless. If I’m not asleep in half an hour, I’ll get up and make some breakfast. I’ll watch the sunrise. Vacuum.

When dawn finally arrived, he lay awake for a few minutes, ran his tongue over his teeth. He reached out and touched the other half of his bed. No one was supposed to be there; he just stretched his arms. Then he rose quickly, showered, shaved, and sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and newspaper. He read headlines, a few Help Wanted ads, and circled one with a pencil.

“Good morning,” he said aloud, then louder. “Good morning.”

“People change,” she told Victor. He watched her face as she spoke and watched her hands when she touched his arm.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. Her hands were white and small. He remembered how white and small they looked against his brown skin as they lay together, wrapped in sheets. She fell asleep easily and he watched her, listened to her breathing, until his breath fell into the same rhythm, until he slept.

“I miss watching you sleep,” he said.

“Listen, things are just crazy right now. I went to a party the other night and someone had some cocaine, you know? It was there and I liked it.”

“You mean you snorted it?”

“No, no. I just liked it being there. I danced, too. There was music, and people were dancing out by the pool. So I danced.”

He stared at her then. She smiled and touched her face, brushed hair away from her eyes.

“God,” she said. “I could really get addicted to cocaine, you know? I could really like it.”

Victor sipped his coffee carefully even though it was lukewarm. He stared out over the cup, through the window into the sun rising. He felt dizzy and didn’t stand up for fear of falling. His eyes were heavy, ached.

“Today,” he said to his coffee, “I’m going to run.”

He imagined pulling on a pair of shorts and his tennis shoes, stretching his muscles on the back porch before he set out into the early morning. Two, maybe three miles out and then back to the house. A few sit-ups, push-ups, to cool down and a piece of dry toast to settle his stomach. Instead, he finished his coffee and switched on the television, flipped through a few stations before he found a face he liked. A pretty blond woman was reading the local news, but he turned the volume all the way down, watched her mouth working silently.

Soon she was replaced by other faces, tired reporters with windblown hair, a forest fire, another war. It was all the same. Once, he owned a black-and-white television. He thought everything was much clearer then. Color complicated even the smallest events. A commercial for a new candy bar was so bright, so layered, he ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Still, he drank his coffee straight today. In other yesterdays he poured vodka into his cup before the coffee was finished brewing.

“Shit,” he said aloud. “Nothing more hopeless than a sober Indian.”

Victor was fancydancing. Eight, maybe nine years old and he was fancydancing in the same outfit his father wore as a child. The feathers were genetic; the fringe was passed down like the curve of his face.

Drums.

He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.

Drums.

After the dance, back at camp, he ate fry bread with too much butter and drank a Pepsi just pulled from the cooler. The Pepsi was partly frozen and the little pieces of ice hurt his teeth.

“Did you see Junior dancing?” his mother asked everyone in camp. She was loud, drunk, staggered.

They all nodded heads in agreement; this other kind of dancing was nothing new. His father passed out beneath the picnic table, and after a while his mother crawled under, wrapped her arms around her husband, and passed out with him. Of course, they were in love.

Drums.

Victor was drunk again.

A night in the wooden-floor bar and she wanted to dance, but he wanted to drink and ease that tug in his throat and gut.

“Come on, you’ve had enough,” she said.

“Just one more beer, sweetheart, and then we’ll go home.”

It happened that way. He thought one more beer could save the world. One more beer and every chair would be comfortable. One more beer and the light bulb in the bathroom would never burn out. One more beer and he would love her forever. One more beer and he would sign any treaty for her.

At home, in the dark, they fought and kicked at sheets, at each other. She waited for him to pass out. He drank so much but he would never pass out. He cried.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “I hate the fucking world.”

“Go to sleep.”

He closed his eyes; he played the stereo at full volume. He punched the walls but never hard enough to hurt himself.

“Nothing works. Nothing works.”

Mornings after, he would pretend sleep while she dressed, left for work and her own home. Mornings after, she paused at the door before leaving, asked herself if this was for good.

One morning, it was.

Sometimes Victor worked.

He drove a garbage truck for the BIA; he cooked hamburgers at the Tribal Cafe. On payday, his wallet stuffed with money, he would stand in front of the beer cooler in the Trading Post.

“How long has he been standing there?” Phyllis asked Seymour.

“Some say he’s been there for hours. That woman over there with the music case says Victor has been standing there his whole life. I think he’s been there for five hundred years.”

Once, Victor bought a case of Coors Light and drove for miles with the bottles beside him on the seat. He would open one, touch the cold glass to his lips, and feel his heart stagger. But he could not drink, and one by one he tossed twenty-four full bottles out the window.

The small explosions, their shattering, was the way he measured time.

Victor watched the morning arrive and leave. His hands were cold. He pressed them against the window glass and waited for some warmth to translate. He’d been back home on the reservation for one hundred days after being lost in the desert for forty years. But he wasn’t going to save anyone. Maybe not even himself.

He opened his front door to watch the world revolving. He walked onto his front porch and felt the cold air. Tomorrow he would run. He would be somebody’s hero. Tomorrow.

He counted his coins. Enough for a bottle of Annie Green Springs Wine in the Trading Post. He walked down the hill and into the store, grabbed the bottle without hesitation, paid for it with nickels and pennies, and walked into the parking lot. Victor pulled the wine from its paper bag, cracked the seal, and twisted the cap off.

Jesus, he wanted to drink so much his blood could make the entire tribe numb.

“Hey, cousin, you got to let it breathe.”

An Indian stranger jumped from a pickup, walked over to Victor, and smiled.

“What did you say?” Victor asked him.

“I said you got to let it breathe.”

Victor looked at his open bottle, offered it to the stranger in an intertribal gesture.

“You want the first drink, cousin?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

The stranger drank long and hard, his throat working like gears. When he was done, he wiped the bottle clean and handed it back to Victor.

“Listen up,” the stranger said. “Today is my birthday.”

“How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

And they laughed.

Victor looked at the bottle again and offered it again to the stranger in a personal gesture.

“Have a birthday drink.”

“Shit, you’re a generous drunk, enit?”

“Generous enough.”

And they laughed.

The Indian stranger drank half the bottle with one swallow. He smiled when he handed the wine back to Victor.

“What tribe are you, cousin?” Victor asked him.

“Cherokee.”

“Really? Shit, I’ve never met a real Cherokee.”

“Neither have I.”

And they laughed.

Victor looked at the bottle for a third time. He handed it back to the Indian stranger.

“Keep it,” he said. “You deserve it more.”

“Thanks, cousin. My throat is dry, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

Victor touched the Indian stranger’s hand, smiled hard at him, and walked away. He looked at the sun to determine the time and then checked his watch to be sure.

“Hey, cousin,” the Indian stranger yelled. “You know how to tell the difference between a real Indian and a fake Indian?”

“How?”

“The real Indian got blisters on his feet. The fake Indian got blisters on his ass.”

And they laughed. And Victor kept laughing as he walked. And he was walking down this road and tomorrow maybe he would be walking down another road and maybe tomorrow he would be dancing. Victor might be dancing.

Yes, Victor would be dancing.