794 The American Century: Literature since 1945Montana who had earlier joined the band. “Songs were waiting for them in the city,”
Thomas believes. He has become a mobile adventurer, who nevertheless takes the
memories, even some of the mysticism, of the “rez” with him. Robert Johnson,
meanwhile, chooses to stay where he is. “I think this tribe’s been waiting for me for
a long time,” he says. “I think these Indians might need me. Maybe need me and
music. Besides, it’s beautiful here.”
In dramatizing the fortunes of Coyote Springs, Alexie plays with several
possibilities. The band and its music catch the tensions in contemporary Native
American culture, convey ways of turning pain into poetry, loss into story and
song that are similar to Alexie’s own, and concentrate the raw feeling and rough
magic of the entire narrative. Also, in their rise and fall, the band connects up with
history. After all, the record company that spurns Coyote Springs bears a name,
Cavalry Records, that recalls earlier white interventions in Native American
territory and culture. And, freewheeling between past and present, the narrative
presents the executives of the company, called Wright and Sheridan, as all too
substantial ghosts. They are the nineteenth-century military leaders, Colonel
George Wright and General Philip Sheridan, living on into the late twentieth
century. The link is clear, and clearly forged in its downbeat way, between the
victimization of Native Americans in an earlier age and the exploitation, the
cultural and commercial sidelining of Native Americans now. Wright, in particular,
is described as the man who in 1858 ordered the killing of hundreds of Spokane
horses. And the spirits of those horses appear sporadically throughout the novel,
in a kind of collective narrative memorializing of pain, a mystic commemoration
of a past that keeps repeating itself – that just will not, cannot go away. After Coyote
Springs fails to perform as required in the recording studio, Wright sees in the
band “the faces of millions of Indians, beaten, scarred, by smallpox and frostbite,
split open by bayonets and bullets.” Gazing at his own hands he sees “the blood
stains there.” That is his vision, the significant past that haunts him. The past that
haunts the central Native American characters Thomas and his traveling
companions at the end of Reservation Blues is utterly, remarkably different. As
Thomas, Chess, and Checkers leave for the city in their van, they see shadows that
become horses. “The horses were following, leading Indians toward the city,” we
are told, “while other Indians were traditional dancing in the Longhouse after the
feast, while drunk Indians stood outside the Trading Post, drinking and laughing.”
In the van, the three travelers begin to sing. “They sang together with the shadow
horses: we are alive, we’ll keep living. Songs were waiting for them up there in the
dark.” It is with this visionary mix of myth, the material, and magic, the past and
the possible, that Reservation Blues ends – in an end that is, of course, no end at all.
“Thomas drove through the dark. He drove,” are the final words. “Chess and
Checkers reached out of their window and held tightly to the manes of those
shadow horses running alongside the blue van.” In the end is the beginning, it
seems. The first Americans have not vanished; they are journeying on, transforming
mourning into music, commemorating the “dead Indians” but also celebrating the
living. Just like those generations that lived American lives for thousands of yearsGGray_c05.indd 794ray_c 05 .indd 794 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM