War Dances by Sherman Alexie
One of the men shook his head; the other turned his back and spoke into a cell phone.
Paul bowed his head with shame.
And then he spoke so softly that he wasn’t sure the men heard him. Paul thought of his wife and his daughters, of Sara Smile, and he said, “I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want to be forgotten. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me.”
On Airplanes
I am always amused
By those couples—
Lovers and spouses—
Who perform and ask
Others to perform
Musical chairs
Whenever they, by
Random seat selection,
Are separated
From each other.
“Can you switch
Seats with me?”
A woman asked me.
“So I can sit
With my husband?”
She wanted me,
A big man, who
Always books early,
And will gratefully
Pay extra for the exit row,
To trade my aisle seat
For her middle seat.
By asking me to change
My location for hers,
The woman is actually
Saying to me:
“Dear stranger, dear
Sir, my comfort is
More important than yours.
Dear solitary traveler,
My love and fear—
As contained
Within my marriage—
Are larger than yours.”
O, the insult!
O, the condescension!
And this is not
An isolated incident.
I’ve been asked
To trade seats
Twenty or thirty times
Over the years.
How dare you!
How dare you
Ask me to change
My life for you!
How imperial!
How colonial!
But, ah, here is
The strange truth:
Whenever I’m asked
To trade seats
For somebody else’s love,
I do, I always do.
Big Bang Theory
After our earliest ancestors crawled out of the oceans, how soon did they feel the desire to crawl back in?
At age nine, I stepped into the pool at the YWCA. I didn’t know how to swim, but the other Indian boys had grown salmon and eagle wings and could fly in water and sky.
Wouldn’t the crow, that ubiquitous trickster, make a more compelling and accurate national symbol for the United States than the bald eagle?
Okay, that Indian-boy salmon-and-eagle-wings transformation thing is bullshit, but I’m trying to tell a creation story here, and by definition all creation stories are bullshit. Scientifically speaking, we all descend from one man and woman who lived in what we now call Africa—yes, we are all African at our cores—but why should we all live with the same metaphorical creation story? The Kiowa think they were created when lightning struck the mud inside a log. I think the Hopis are crash-landed aliens who are still waiting for a rescue mission. Christians think God built everything in a week—well, in six days—and then rested. Yeah, like God created the universe in anticipation of the Sunday funny pages.
Q: In the singles bar, over nonalcoholic beer, what did the Palestinian say to the Israeli?
A: “Your holy war or mine?”
But wait, before I get too critical or metaphysical, let me return to that YWCA on Maple Street in Spokane, Washington. I stood alone in the shallow end while my big brother, cousins, best friend, and little warrior enemies swam in the deep end. I was so ashamed, but then our female swim instructors shouted my name and challenged me to dive off the five-foot board. Fuck that! I jumped out of the pool and ran into the locker room.
There is a myth that drowning is a peaceful death. I’ve heard people say, “I would just open my mouth and breathe death in.” In truth, drowning is torture. The fear of drowning is used as torture.
At the YWCA, I quickly dressed and waited for the other Indian boys, who mocked me for my aquatic cowardice and locked me in a towel bin. But I escaped and made it onto the bus that took us to the Fox Theater for a matinee showing of Jaws, the blockbuster that changed the way our country looks at sharks and at films.
Did you know that when a shark stops swimming, it dies?
As we walked past the endless line of movie lovers, the other boys kept pitching me crap, but then our female swim instructors, one Japanese and one Korean, shouted my name again and insisted that I join them in the line. “But what about us?” my brother asked. “You go to the deep end,” the Japanese girl said.
A wise man once said that revenge is not more important than love or compassion. Until it is.
I was nine. The Asian girls were sixteen. I sat between them and they each held one of my hands as we watched a great white shark devour people. At one point, when a little boy was in danger, I hid my face in the Korean girl’s chest. Oh, it was the first time I had ever been that close to a woman’s breast.
Do you think the universe is expanding or contracting?
I wish I knew what happened to those Asian girls. Are they still living in Spokane? Do you realize how much they mean to me? Did they love me? Or was I just a sad-ass kid who needed their help? If I could talk to them, I would tell them this creation story: “A bonnethead shark in Omaha, Nebraska, conceived and gave birth to a baby that soon died. But this mother shark had never shared water with a male. Scientists were puzzled. So they performed a DNA test and discovered the dead baby only had its mother’s DNA. Yes, that bonnethead shark had given virgin birth. Do you think this is amazing? Well, it’s not. Dozens of species of insects give virgin birth. Crayfish give virgin birth. Some honeybees give virgin birth. And Komodo dragons—yeah, those big lizards give virgin birth, too. Jeez, one human gives virgin birth and that jump-starts one of the world’s great religions. But when a Komodo dragon gives virgin birth, do you know what it’s thinking? It’s thinking, This is Tuesday, right? I think this is Tuesday. What am I going to do on Wednesday?
Ode for Pay Phones
ALL
That
Autumn,
I walked from
The apartment (shared
With my sisters) to that pay phone
On Third Avenue, next to a sleazy gas station
And down the block from the International House of Pancakes. I was working the night
Shift at a pizza joint and you were away at college. You dated a series of inconsequential boys. Well, each boy meant little on his
Own, but their cumulative effect devastated my brain and balls. I wanted you to stop kissing relative strangers, so I called you at midnight as often as I could afford. If I talked to you that late, I knew
(Or hoped) you couldn’t rush into anybody’s bed. But, O, I still recall the misery of hearing the ring, ring, ring, ring
Of your unanswered phone. These days, I’d text you to find you, but where’s the delicious pain
In that? God, I miss standing in the mosquito dark
At this or that pay phone. I wish
That I could find one
And call back
All that
I
Loved.
Fearful Symmetry
WHEN HE WAS EIGHTEEN and a senior in high school, Sherwin Polatkin and a GROUP of his schoolmates jumped into two cars and drove into Spokane to see The Breakfast Club. Sherwin sat next to Karen, a smart and confident sophomore—a farm-town white girl with the sun-bleached hair and tanned skin of a harvest truck driver. She’d never been of romantic interest, so Sherwin slouched in his seat and munched on popcorn. It was just the random draw of a dozen friends choosing seats.
But near the end of the movie, as Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson were making out in a supply closet, Sherwin was surprised
Sherwin was not a virgin—he’d had sex with three girls—but this was the first time a girl had been so indirect with her desires. He’d touched naked women, but this hand-holding—this skin against skin—seemed far more intimate. He loved it. He was a Spokane Indian, the lead singer for his drum group, and had a sudden urge to sing an honor song for Karen—for her tenderness. He was nervous they’d be discovered. He knew their friends would be both titillated and slightly offended by this contact. It seemed like a betrayal of what was otherwise a platonic gathering. But Sherwin could not stop it. And Karen certainly didn’t want to stop it. He would never touch her again, and they would never speak of the moment and would not see each other again after high school, but Sherwin always considered it one of the best moments of his life.
So, years later, when he became a professional writer, Sherwin would tell curious journalists that he loved movies and his favorite movie of all time was The Breakfast Club, but he would never tell them why. He knew that the best defense against fame was keeping certain secrets. He hoped that Karen, wherever she was, would someday read an interview with him and smile when she read about his cinematic preference.
On August 11, 1948, sixteen smoke jumpers, led by a taciturn man named Wayne Ford, parachuted into Sirois Canyon, a remote area near Wenatchee, Washington, to fight a small wildfire. However, the fire, unpredictable as such fires can be, exploded into a fifty-foot-tall wall of flame, jumped the canyon, and chased the smoke jumpers up a steep and grassy hillside. Fifteen smoke jumpers tried to outrun the fire, an impossible race to win, but Wayne Ford didn’t run. Instead, he did something that was new and crazy: He built the first U.S. Forest Service escape fire.
Did you know that you can escape a fire by setting another fire at your feet? You might seem to be building a funeral pyre, but you’re creating a circle of safety. In order to save your endangered ass, all you have to do is burn down the grass surrounding you, lie facedown in the ash, and pray that the bigger fire will pass over you like a flock of blind and burning angels.
I know you’re thinking, You’re crazy. There’s no way I’m going to set a fire when another fire is already chasing me. And that’s exactly what Wayne Ford’s men thought. They had never seen any firefighter set one fire to escape another. It was unprecedented—for white folks. Indians had set many such escape fires before white men had arrived in the Americas, but Wayne Ford and his men had no way of knowing this.
Wise Wayne Ford—who before the fire had the same color and sinewy bite as one hundred and fifty pounds of deer jerky—could never fully explain why he set his escape fire. All he ever said is that it just made sense. Ford’s men tried to outrun the murderous flames, but one by one they all succumbed to the fire and smoke. Ford calmly lay down in the ash, in his circle of safety, and lived.
Thirty years after the Sirois Canyon fire, Harris Tolkin, a former smoke jumper, began to write a nonfiction chronicle of the tragedy, Fearful Symmetry: The True Story of the Sirois Canyon Fire. Tolkin borrowed the title of his book from the first and last stanzas of William Blake’s most famous poem:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In exploring the meanings of the Sirois Canyon fire and its aftermath, Tolkin relied heavily on William Blake’s notions of innocence and experience and on the dichotomies of joy and sorrow, childhood and adulthood, religious faith and doubt, and good and evil. Tolkin died before completing the book, but it was edited by his daughter, Diane Tolkin, and was posthumously published in 2002 and was a surprise New York Times best seller for twenty-six weeks. In 2003, Tesla Studios, fresh off a Best Picture Oscar for their Civil War epic, Leaves of Grass, approached a hot young short-story writer, poet and first-time screenwriter, Sherwin Polatkin, to adapt Fearful Symmetry for the big screen.
Sitting in the Tesla offices, Sherwin stared through a glass desk at the bare feet of the executive producer, a short thin man who was otherwise completely dressed in a gorgeous bespoke suit.
“So, Sherwin,” the producer said, “why are you here?”
That was a strange question, considering that Sherwin had been invited. He decided that it must be an existential query. Or no, maybe it was just the first question of a job interview. This was Hollywood, yes, but Sherwin was really just a typist—a creative typist—trying to get a job.
“Well, number one,” Sherwin said, “I know fire like no other screenwriter in this town. I was a hotshot, a forest firefighter, for ten summers. It’s how I paid for college.”
That was a lie. Sherwin had only fought one fire in his life—a burning hay bale—and he’d only had to pour ten buckets of water on it. But this executive had no way of knowing Sherwin was a liar. Wasn’t everybody in Hollywood a liar? Maybe Sherwin could only distinguish himself by the quality of his lies and not their quantity.
“And number two, I’m a Native American,” Sherwin said. “I’m indigenous to the West, to the idea of the West, and you’re not going to find that sort of experience in film school.”
That couldn’t be true. Wasn’t Hollywood filled with small-town folks from the West—hell, from everywhere? Wasn’t Hollywood filled with nomads? Yes, Jewish folks, those original nomads, created the movie business, and it had not really changed in all the decades since, had it? Wasn’t Sherwin really just one more nomad in a business filled with nomads? How could he really distinguish himself?
“Listen,” Sherwin said to the executive, “I’m nervous and I’m exaggerating, and I’m sounding like an arrogant bastard, so let’s just start over. Is that okay? Can we call cut and start this scene over? Can we do a reshoot?”
The executive smiled and tugged at his toes. Yes, they were well-manicured toes, but it was still disconcerting, in the context of a business meeting, to see something—ten things—so naked and—well, toelike.
“We’ve had about a dozen screenwriters work on this project,” the executive said. “And had three different directors attached. And none of them could crack this thing. So tell me, how are you going to crack it?”
Sherwin didn’t quite understand the terminology. He assumed it had something to do with secret codes and languages. So he went with that.
“Well, the book itself is a tragedy,” Sherwin said.
“Tragedies are fucked at the box office,” the executive said.
Sherwin didn’t know if that was true. It didn’t feel true. Or maybe it was truer than Sherwin wanted to believe. Weren’t Americans afraid of tragedy? As a Native American, Sherwin was, by definition, trapped in a difficult but lustful marriage with tragedy. But that cultural fact wouldn’t get him this job.
“I think there’s redemption in this story,” Sherwin said. “I know I can find the redemption.”
“Redemption,” the executive said. “Yes, that’s exactly what we need.”
Thus hired on the basis of one word—one universal concept—Sherwin tried to transform a tragedy into a redemptive action-adventure movie. How did he go about his task? First he pulled the story out of the past and reset it in the present. Why? Because the studio thought the audience wouldn’t watch another period piece, and because the director—an old studio pro who was rumored to have had sex with at least three of the actresses who’d starred in Dallas, the TV series—wanted his Chinese girlfriend to play the female lead. Ah, the things one does for diversity!
But in changing the time frame of the Sirois Canyon fire at the behest of the capitalistic studio and the love-struck director, Polatkin was confronted with a logical problem. If the fictional Wayne Ford were to set an escape fire in 2003 and still be ignored by hi
Such are the dangers of creating art based on other art. Such are the dangers of Hollywood, where it is contractually understood that screenwriters will write first drafts with verve, and then, with each revision, lose more nerve and individuality. It’s fucked, but Polatkin got paid five hundred thousand bucks to write a first draft where the killing fire burned as brightly as William Blake’s tygers. In fact, Wayne Ford, younger and renamed for the film, saw tygers inside the flames as they chased his team up the steep slope. The others lost all innocence and hope and died before they reached the summit. But Ford reached the top and made the mad plummet down the back slope with the fire tygers in pursuit. He didn’t build an escape fire—no time for that old tactic—he just ran, and he survived because he was so damn fast.
There is real inspiration for this fictional flight from fiery death. On July 3, 1999, near Boulder, Colorado, another relatively small wildfire exploded into a conflagration and chased sixteen firefighters up a steep slope and killed fifteen of them. Only Richard McPhee, an experienced smoke jumper out of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, was able to outrun the flames. Later, when researchers did the math, they estimated that McPhee ran the equivalent of a hundred-yard dash in nine seconds. That would be a world-record speed on a flat surface, but McPhee ran it while carrying a forty-pound backpack up a heavily forested sixty-degree slope. The man wanted to live. It gives one pleasure to take the measure of a man’s fight to survive. Ask yourself: Could I have run that fast and won the right to live? This might be glib, but certain men are born to be stars—to be at their best when faced with death. Richard McPhee only believes he was lucky.