Basketball is also a white man's invention that's been appropriated as the reservation game every Indian plays. In Alexie's fiction, basketball is a weapon and therapy for negotiating the straits between an impoverished Indian world and a suspicious, secret-coded white one. The Lone Ranger is a collage of dreams, journal entries, quotes from other native writers, archival letters, fictional Kafkaesque court transcripts, tribal newspaper reports, drug trips, and basketball games. A young man with dark skin and long black hair is watched like a thief for walking into a 7-11 to buy a Creamsicle. Stare up at the surface, sunlight filtered through water like fingers, like a hand filled with the promise of love and oxygen."Īnd there are the constant humiliations Indians suffer off the "rez": A couple is pulled over for no reason by a cop who extorts money. "I remember my brother stretched out over the lawnmower, his mouth pressed tightly to the mouth of the gas tank.
There are days when Victor's family is so hungry they fantasize eating "oranges, Pepsi-Cola, chocolate, deer jerky." Life in this American Soweto is so suffocating that drinking Sterno or sniffing rubber cement and gas fumes is a rite of passage as innocent as a child's first kiss. Victor's sisters save a few quarters to buy food coloring to dye the potatoes red, green and blue, helping them imagine that the starchy whiteness is anything else. Both grew up on the reservation for the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribe, a government ghetto where dogs won't eat the "commodity" (government-issue) beef and cheese, but people do. One of them, Victor, is at least part Sherman Alexie. Maybe from all that thumping, the narrators of most of the 22 stories in The Lone Ranger are insomniacs. Keeping time like the staccato thumping of a nail stuck in a tire are drumbeats, blaring televisions, dancing, fighting, nightmares, visions and the small explosions of beer bottles thrown from a car driving in no particular direction. The world, in this case, is an American Indian reservation.
READING Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is like leaning out the side window of a speeding car, watching the world slip in and out of focus faster than you can sort the future from the present from the past.
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