The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Victor’s father appears in only three of the 24 short stories within the collection. However, his presence animates every narrative featuring Victor, often as the story’s volatile and indirect antagonist. He is never shown at odds with Victor, but rather with the rest of the world, including Victor’s mother. His alcohol addiction creates “nightmares, in [Victor’s] everyday reality” (6), and his emotional and physical unavailability contributes to Victor’s sense of alienation.

Mr. Joseph is prone to intense mood swings of rage, despair, and excitement, especially when drinking: Victor describes his father’s deflated posture straightening from a “question mark” to an “exclamation point” at such times (6). Alcohol transforms Mr. Joseph’s doubt into assurance, helping him cope with his memories of loss. Ironically, his dependence becomes the undoing of his strained marriage, resulting in another loss even as Victor tries to connect with his father and ease his pain.

Like Victor, Victor’s father is an antihero. He endures or escapes hardship but does not overcome it, and he has no safe outlet for his grief or anger. Mr. Joseph’s brandished rifle at the Vietnam war protest ironically reveals his internal conflict—desiring peace but threatening violence—which reflects his awareness of his people’s history. He holds that the country has “been trying to kill Indians since the very beginning” (29), revealing his existential dread.

Mr. Joseph represents the defeat and surrender of the Indigenous man. The loss of tribe, station, and connection forces his retreat. His untimely and unwitnessed death echoes the invisible—i.e., unacknowledged—history of tribal genocide. When Victor calls his parents “dreamless,” he suggests that they lack not only imagination but consciousness—a death-like condition even when they are still technically living.

Mrs. Joseph, Victor’s mother, is a static character in the short stories where she surfaces. She figures as a loving caretaker despite her drinking bouts and heated arguments with Victor’s father. During times of deprivation, she shows emotional and physical creative powers; she “would rise with her medicine and magic” to feed and clothe the family and “comb Victor’s braids into dreams” (5). Her generous nature extends to whoever is in need; even after the dissolution of her marriage, Victor’s mother attends her husband in the hospital after his motorcycle accident (though she ends her vigil once he becomes more independent).

Mrs. Joseph contrasts with Victor’s father. For all of her past oppression, she resists letting her circumstances dictate her happiness. Like her husband, she experiences alcohol addiction, but she attempts to move beyond it. She exercises her agency by reconnecting with Spokane traditions such as powwow dancing and cooking fry bread while also attending to the tribe’s present needs. In this, she represents a feminine form of Indigenous heroism. She balances her personal and tribal identities, often sacrificing the former for the latter; without this loyalty to family and tribe, Victor would have no chance of survival. Through her, Alexie communicates that Indigenous communities thrive in direct proportion to their mothers’ commitment to heal and support.

Thomas is the storytelling friend of Victor and Junior. He appears in only three stories, yet the entire collection depends upon his symbolic character. Thomas is a loner and a guileless misfit. When a teenager, Victor beats him up for no apparent reason. Thomas’s friends grow tired of listening to his unsolicited “goddamn stories” (14), which they feel are cryptic and irrelevant. His good intentions are palpable throughout, exemplified most by his financing of Victor’s trip to Phoenix to collect his father’s ashes.

Thomas looms as a sage and mystical character. His storytelling borders on religious evangelism; for example, he admonishes his audience to seek wisdom from the Indigenous “saints” of old, foretelling either calamity or prosperity depending on whether they heed this advice. However, he is also a dreamer who takes his audience on borrowed vision quests. He models and imparts to his community the creative capacity to imagine a better future—that is, Storytelling as Creative Agency and Identity Through Dreams and Visions.

Alexie presents Thomas as the tribe’s collective conscience and consciousness. Thomas’s stories remind the tribe of its heritage in order to ground its identity in the present. As the only character in this collection who maneuvers above Indigenous oppression, Thomas represents hope and change for the Spokane culture at large. If they can dream and tell their stories, they can process the injustices of the past while claiming their right to the future. 

Junior, a friend of Victor, is a round protagonist appearing in at least four short stories in this collection. Junior first appears both instigating and facilitating Victor’s exploits, including the one to Benjamin Lake in “A Drug Called Tradition.” He experiences the general trauma of reservation life, yet he avoids sustained feelings of worthlessness and doom, as well as habitual self-destructive behavior. The two friends’ mushroom-induced hallucinations foreshadow this difference; Victor is haunted to the point of discarding the drug and hiding, while Junior enjoys his visions free from fear.

Like Victor, Junior takes solace in his mother’s company. Like Thomas, Junior also tells stories. “A Good Story,” which Junior narrates, is an anomaly of reservation experience, much like its teller. Junior is unique as a character who transcends financial and cultural destitution on a practical level. He applies himself at school, graduates as valedictorian, and pursues higher education. He challenges authority at its root of ideology and colonial power by confronting his history professor. Further, he is the only major character who has a child over the course of the collection, bringing a new generation of Spokane people into existence. As such, Junior represents resistance to tribal discrimination through envisioning a hopeful future and then seizing a power to make it possible—education.

Julius emerges as Victor’s foil in “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore.” He is the reservation’s newest star basketball player, whom Victor compares himself to. Julius is dominant on the court and indifferent to social pressure; he once abandoned a game simply “because there wasn’t enough competition” (45). Victor admires him in part because he embodies what Victor sought to be at the same age, before losing his own high school championship. Julius initially seems immune to defeat on or off the court, especially as he hasn’t yet started drinking.

Over time, however, Julius caves to the wrong crowd, gets arrested for vandalism, and begins drinking alcohol before his basketball games. Julius’s descent from athletic greatness is a modern-day symbol of the defeated Indigenous American warrior. Perhaps more importantly, his character reveals the tribe’s aching need for greatness, even if it vicariously rests upon the shoulders of a 15-year-old.

Dirty Joe only appears in the short story “Amusements.” He arrives as a static stock character—the proverbial “town drunk.” Victor and his friend attend a carnival where they notice Dirty Joe passed out cold. Their pity for him conflicts with their desire to leave him to a white supremacist legal system: “We leave him here and he’s going to jail for sure” (55), Victor observes. Ultimately, they have fun at his expense by placing him on a roller coaster while he is still unconscious. This public humiliation of Dirty Joe causes Victor profound shame and remorse. In exposing Dirty Joe to ridicule, the friends also expose the absence of tribal bonds. The scene illustrates the collection’s claim that Indigenous people too often have failed to “[t]ake care of each other” (69).

Norma Many Horses features in two short stories in this collection: “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” and “Somebody Kept Saying Powwow.” In the former, she is James Many Horses’ wife. In the latter, she is Junior’s confidante. The stories’ complementary perspectives extol her virtues: She is emotionally attentive, judicious, and likable. Junior comments, “Everybody wanted to talk to Norma, to share some time with her” (200). However, she is no pushover. After she breaks up the fight between Victor and Thomas as teenagers, Junior observes that “She could have picked up any two of the boys and smashed their skulls together” (65). In her middle adulthood, though she has no children, many in the community respectfully call her “grandmother” (199).

To Junior, Norma appears to be the sage of the community. She possesses special knowledge of tribal traditions in the form of dancing, making fry bread, and roping horses. To James, she is the spiritual caretaker who aids tribal elders at nursing homes, and he hopes her caretaking nature will extend to him in his final days. However, she does not fit into stereotypical social constructs for the reservation woman; she is sexually adventurous and publicly vocal, and she shifts comfortably between Spokane and white norms.

Norma thus retains her individuality while using her emotional intelligence to attend to the community. Norma represents a bridge between the worlds of cultural life and cultural death. She bears loving, direct witness to deaths and mourns each loss: “Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away” (167).

“Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation” and “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” center on James Many Horses, or baby James. Baby James’s mother, Rosemary, claimed that her son was immaculately conceived like Jesus in Christian teaching. Because of this (and because no one can pronounce his Spokane name), the tribe calls him James—the biblical name of Jesus’s brother.

James barely survives his birth and then nearly dies in the house fire that takes the lives of his parents. He is reluctantly adopted by the unnamed man who attempted, but failed, to catch him as he was thrown from the second-story window during the blaze. Whether due to trauma at birth or during the fire, James’s verbal and physical development is affected. His guardian claims to hear James finally utter words—in fact, philosophical wisdom—at age seven.

James next appears after he has married Norma and at the point when he receives his terminal cancer diagnosis. He cannot resist making witty, sarcastic quips about the news, using humor as his coping strategy. He tells his wife that the x-rays showed “about 755 damn tumors inside” him and that his favorite one was “about the size of a baseball” so she should call him “Babe Ruth” (157). Norma, put off by his lack of solemnity, leaves him.

Of all Alexie’s protagonists in this collection, James makes the most dynamic transformation. He changes from a tragic and silent child to a playful, quick-witted, wise-cracking adult—a jester who, through his foolery, draws attention to profound truth. Baby James typifies powerlessness and dependence, whereas adult James, as his last name implies, represents the possibility of journeying long distances. His story comments on the silencing of Indigenous peoples. Forced assimilation in mid-19th-century America required that Indigenous Americans give up their language and thus abandon their cultural identification and political voice. Alexie provides a character who finds a way to express his identity even in the direst of circumstances—without home, family, physical health, adequate care, etc. Rather than silently surrender, he challenges his fellow Indigenous Americans to laugh in the face of death, recalling the question that “Imagining the Reservation” poses: “Do you believe laughter can save us?” (152).

Samuel gets introduced as Thomas’s grandfather in “A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result.” He is an effervescent, industrious everyman on his way to work, thinking about his children and anticipating the day ahead. He’s known to be an excellent storyteller, but since his family no longer lives nearby, he finds himself without an audience. He instead lends his inherent generosity to an extended family of strangers who pass through the hotel where he works.

When his boss unexpectedly lays him off, Samuel’s outlook and worldview immediately change. On a whim, he enters a local bar and orders his first drink—an act he would have never considered before. Samuel quickly begins drinking: He thinks to himself, “I understand everything” (134), and he decides to make a lifestyle out of drinking. However, after his first night at the bar, he ends up passed out on the railroad tracks. This rapid descent makes Samuel a tragic hero. Having lived his life by a moral code and having no money, family, friends, or success to show for it, he forsakes his ideals.

With alcohol dependence permeating this collection, Samuel’s story provides an alternate perspective on addiction: the moments just before it begins. His character arc illustrates how easy it is to “fall into alcoholism and surrendered dreams” (133). By characterizing Samuel as a devoted and diligent family man, Alexie counteracts negative racial stereotypes that would otherwise write Samuel off for his drinking addiction.

Nezzy, Victor’s aunt, is the protagonist of “The Fun House.” She is an independently-minded and sharp-tongued woman living in a trailer on the reservation. She embraces Indigenous customs by sewing traditional buckskin outfits and beaded dresses to sell. Nezzy was an accomplished Spokane dancer in the past but to make ends meet, she now dances at topless bars.

Nezzy’s role is that of an outlaw. Although she has a family, she feels emotionally disconnected from them; when they respond to a mouse running up her leg with laughter rather than help, she walks into the river and spends the rest of the day refusing their pleas to come home. She is well-intentioned but not tender-hearted, telling her son that she “didn’t mean to give birth” to him and considers him worthless (78).

Through flashbacks, Alexie reveals that Nezzy was tricked by the Indian Health Service into forced sterilization after her son’s delivery. This event gives context to her pervasive anger and resentment, presenting her as an Indigenous woman ensnared by the bureaucratic system supposedly designed to help her. Instead, it limits her choices in order to prevent further growth of the tribe at large. Isolated at home, Nezzy attempts to find protection and belonging through engaging in tribal dancing and dress. Her character emphasizes Indigenous individuals’ right to choose—not just reproductively, but also in their ways of life.

“Flight” is a stand-alone story that appears only in Alexie’s anniversary edition. It follows the despondent protagonist, John-John, inside his HUD home on the reservation. His mind wanders to the memory of his older brother, possibly Victor, who left home to become a pilot in the war. He recalls in detail the letter informing the family that his brother had been captured as a POW. Since that time John-John has kept vigil, listening and watching for his brother’s return. Whether awake or asleep, he is consumed with his brother’s homecoming either by recalling their past together or imagining the multiple scenarios in which his return could take place.

John-John is a tragic figure who symbolizes innocence and the paralyzing grief that comes with losing tribe and community. With so much out of his control, John-John only finds resolution through his dreams. The story’s title suggests his brother’s flight as a military pilot, but it also describes John-John’s imagined flight to rescue him. In the end, John-John takes an active role by pretending to aid in their reunion; “The rescue team would find John-John and Joseph huddled together like old men, like children” (231).

Alexie uses John-John’s crushing emotional pain as a parallel to Indigenous family loss and separation. With numerous historical battles having been fought against and alongside the US, many Indigenous sons and daughters have gone missing, creating an enduring void. John-John’s “Flight” does not signify freedom, but rather escape from his bereavement. His brother never comes home.