142 Alexie, Sherman
He moves in with a white girl, gets a clerk job at a
7-11, and runs the graveyard shift. When he and his
girlfriend fight, he drives away, learning the streets
of Seattle in midnight tours of empty hills. He
can never decide what he wants more: a life in the
city, capitulating to the commercial and capitalist
processes of a gentrified life, or a life back on the
reservation, a hero in remission, the most successful
failure of his generation. He turns first to drinking,
the oblivion of the alcoholic haze that dulls the need
for a decision, but his girlfriend will not let him find
the answer at the bottom of a tall glass. “You’re just
like your brother,” she yells. “Drunk all the time and
stupid.” He knows exactly how much everything
costs: “And she was a genius, too. She knew exactly
what to say to cause me the most pain.” So, unable
to face the choice, a sober life of capitalist striving
or the sequestered oblivion of the reservation, he
leaves. This choice is not a choice (she tells him
not to return as he leaves), but he leaves the city, his
only solution to his twin desires of being Indian and
being accepted in the larger world, and abandons the
life he began to build. He will never go back.
In the book’s 10th anniversary edition, a story
called “Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show” was
added by the author, who claims in his introduc-
tion that “it contains themes more adroitly covered
in other stories.” Like the previous stories, “Junior
Polatkin” also addresses a theme of being aban-
doned. However, instead of abandoning tradition or
self, Junior acts in a more traditional mise-en-scène
of abandonment. He moves off the reservation to go
to college in Spokane, “the only Indian at Gonzaga,
a small Jesuit school originally founded to educate
the local tribes.” By Christmas break, he has fallen
in love with Lynn, rebellious and outspoken, blonde
and white. He overcomes his own difficulty and
defensiveness, courts her, and has an affair with her.
Sean Casey, “with dark skin and blue eyes, webbed
toes” is born nine months later. But instead of the
movie romance Junior imagines, Lynn is sequestered
by her parents, and though he has “minimal visita-
tion rights,” by the time Sean is three, Junior no
longer has contact with him. He attempts to recover
his ardor for education and his desire to become
more than squandered potential, but even with some
success, he finally leaves the city and returns to the
reservation, returning to the absent dreams and
failed promises he had sought to overcome through
college, career, and a life beyond being “just” Indian.
For Alexie, abandonment is the underlying
state—the affective cause for the fragmentation of
the individual from community, tradition, and fam-
ily. It is the continuous state of the Indian in a soci-
ety that cannot integrate its past and its present, and
as such it cannot conceive its future. When faced
with the possibility of tomorrow, the only choice
is retreat: to run away from the city, the world, and
the senses, and to remember only how it all left you
behind at the bottom of a bottle on the reservation.
Aaron DruckerreGret in The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistf ight in Heaven
Regret means that one wishes that something had
not happened, that the result had been different.
Regret expresses the desire that one’s action resulted
in a different outcome. It is a deep longing for the
alternative. For Sherman Alexie, regret is a poignant
tool for reflection on the environment the contem-
porary reservation Indian inhabits. Junior, Alexie’s
protagonist in “A Good Story,” writes stories about
Indians. His mother reads his stories, but one day
she asks, “Don’t you think your stories are too sad?”
She makes a request: “You should write a story
about something good, a real good story... Because
people should know that good things always happen
to Indians, too.” Junior obliges.
The story is a simple one. Uncle Moses is
a fixture of the reservation: old—very old—and
like his ramshackle home, he seems to survive on
determination and stubborn will. He is well known
throughout the reservation, but few engage with
him. Only Arnold, a chubby, pale boy, takes the time
to really be with him. On this day, in this “good
story,” Arnold skips a class field trip, instead meeting
Uncle Moses for a sandwich and a story. Reflexively,
Uncle Moses tells him the story of Arnold skipping
a class field trip to share a sandwich and a story with
Uncle Moses.
Junior’s story is charming on its surface, but it is
tinged with several layers of regret. First, and most
apparently, is his mother’s initial request. While
quilting, she ruminates on Junior’s stories of crying