The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“A Drug Called Tradition” narrates the escapades of Victor (now a young man) and his friends, Junior and Thomas, during what Victor dubs the second largest party on the reservation. Thomas recently came into money by leasing his inherited land to the Washington Water Power. In spite of his relative prosperity, Thomas never has any food in his refrigerator. Nevertheless, Thomas is now hosting a party where he supplies beer for all the members of his reservation.

Victor entices Junior to leave the party and take a trip to Benjamin Lake so that they can try the magic mushrooms he just acquired. He urges, “It’ll be very fucking Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?” (14). En route, they spot Thomas, who has wandered away from the party, and invite him to join them on the condition that he not tell them any stories until after he has tried the drug. Thomas agrees.

After taking some mushrooms, Thomas sees a vision of Victor in the moonlight stealing a black horse named Flight. Junior tries the drug next and also receives a vision—of Thomas dancing a Ghost Dance naked around a fire. In the vision, Thomas hears tribal drums and his grandparents singing. The buffalo return to the region and more dancers join in. Eventually, the tribe’s dancing circles expand out to include the borders of the United States. The dances last until the European settlers have vanished.

When Victor samples the mushrooms, he envisions Junior performing on stage with a guitar. Both white and Indigenous American people attend his concert, but the white people sit in the back. The Indigenous American US President, “Mr. Edgar Crazy Horse” (18), also enjoys the show. Junior’s lyrics immortalize Crazy Horse’s victory in battle.

When the effects of the drug begin to wear off, Thomas relays a final story about the three of them gathered around Benjamin Lake preparing for a vision quest; they hope to connect with their heritage. When the vision arrives, it projects each of them into their past—to the point in their lives when they tried alcohol for the first time. Instead of tasting the drink, each firmly rejects it. They celebrate by singing, dancing, and stealing horses.

Victor challenges Thomas’s “belief” in this last story. This deeply wounds Thomas, who promptly walks back home. Junior and Victor continue to use the mushrooms, staying at Benjamin Lake until dawn, but when Victor glimpses his deceased grandmother walking toward him on the lake, he quits and hides. Back in town, Big Mom—a “spiritual leader” on the reservation—surprises Junior and Victor with her detailed knowledge of their visions from the night before. She gives Victor an old drum to use if he ever needs her assistance.

Victor describes his father’s past as a Vietnam War protestor sentenced for assault with a deadly weapon after a seemingly unprovoked altercation with a National Guard private. His father survived the two years in prison physically unscathed despite the ongoing threat of various racial gangs. Shortly after his release, Victor’s father hiked his way to Woodstock to see Jimi Hendrix perform. From that point on, Victor’s father often played Jimi’s rendition of the national anthem on cassette. The song elicited strong emotion and brought out the “reservation philosopher” in him. Recognizing the power of this music, Victor played the song for his father after the latter returned from his drinking binges.

Victor’s parents were equally pushed together and pulled apart by their addiction to alcohol. Victor himself was conceived during a drunken night of passion. Nevertheless, Victor recognizes their good intentions toward each other while conceding their willingness to “fight their way to the end” (32). He recalls various conversations with his parents—telling his father that he wished he also had the chance to serve in a war, or visiting Jimi Hendrix’s grave with his parents and hearing his mother speak disparagingly of the musician’s death. Victor’s mother was attentive to her husband when he was involved in a near-fatal motorcycle accident, but he left the family anyway. He traveled around the country, occasionally sending postcards to Victor, who clung to hope his father would return.

“Crazy Horse Dreams” begins with Victor standing unnoticed in the fry bread line at a powwow. He is pursued by a “small Indian woman” (38), who starts up a conversation that Victor is not interested in and attempts to walk away from. Victor notices an acquaintance named Willie Boyd playing Slahal, a traditional game played by Northwestern tribes that involves passing animal bones back and forth, and bets $5 on him. Willie wins his round, and Victor imagines that Willie, who owns an RV with a TV and refrigerator, will remember his generosity and perhaps let him ride along.

The woman re-engages Victor, and they exchange lighthearted sarcastic remarks regarding their ethnicity. Before long, she and Victor are naked in the back of her Winnebago, each having originally imagined the other as someone more striking and desirable. After their sexual encounter, the disillusioned woman realizes Victor is not the man of her dreams. Victor, mutually disappointed and feeling inferior, tells her, “You’re just another goddamned Indian like me” (41). Finally, Victor leaves, repeating the words, “You’re nothing” (41).

“The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” begins with Victor’s friend, Adrian, encouraging him to pull the trigger on the pistol Victor is holding to his own head. Victor hesitates, so Adrian takes the gun away, puts it in his own mouth, and fires. Because it’s only a BB in the chamber, Adrian enjoys the prank.

Afterward, the two friends watch the passersby from Victor’s porch. They notice that the traffic signal has stopped working but are quickly distracted by the group of four or five Indigenous American boys who look like they are up to delinquent activity. They recognize Julius, who is reportedly the “best basketball player on the reservation” (45). Adrian and Victor discuss the high points of Julius’s high school career thus far and muse over his potential.

Victor laments his own basketball career, which was driven by his desire to capture “that feeling of immortality” (46). He lost his drive after viewing photographs of severe injuries in the locker room’s first-aid manuals. With Victor disturbed by the reality of death just before game time, his team soundly lost the championship.

Adrian and Victor return to the subject of the traffic signal only to mock the fact that the reservation never has traffic anyway. They watch as a tribal policeman detains Julius for throwing a brick through the window of a vehicle belonging to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Victor and Adrian fear that Julius will lose his legendary basketball status.

The following summer, Adrian and Victor are again on Victor’s porch. They see Julius affected by alcohol just a couple hours before the tribal school basketball game. At game time, Julius’s performance suffers to the point that he is benched by the fourth quarter. By the game’s end, the reservation crowd is exchanging their favorite Julius stories in commemoration of his glory.

Adrian and Victor return to Victor’s porch. They remark that the traffic light is still broken but recognize that fixing it is pointless when people don’t exercise caution anyway. The next morning, they find Julius sound asleep on the floor of Victor’s house. Victor and Adrian leave him there, situate themselves on the porch, and dream about the next local basketball star—a third-grader named Lucy.

Victor and his friend, Sadie, are attending a “white carnival” when they discover Dirty Joe, a reservation member known for drinking customers’ leftover liquor in taverns, passed out on a main thoroughfare. The friends debate whether or not they should carry him to a safer place or leave him there to face arrest.

Victor and Sadie have nearly decided to leave Dirty Joe where he is when the Stallion roller coaster catches Victor’s attention. The two decide to put Dirty Joe, still unconscious, on the ride and let physics take over, to the excitement of the gathering crowd. Conscience-stricken, Sadie and Victor unsuccessfully attempt to escape without notice, but by this time, Dirty Joe has come to, exited the ride, vomited, and been pushed to the ground by the ride operator. Security guards arrive with clubs to handle the situation, but the carnival worker places the blame on Victor. Security chases Victor into the house of mirrors, causing Victor to consider his actions. Victor sees himself as “the Indian who offered up another Indian like some treaty” (58).

After having been estranged from his father for several years, Victor finds out that his father has died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona. He sets out to claim his father’s ashes and what remains of his savings account, but he can’t afford the trip due to his recent layoff from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He contacts the Tribal Council, anticipating that the nature of his situation will persuade them to fund his travel expenses. Victor receives $100, which is far too little for his journey.

While cashing his Tribal Council check at the reservation Trading Post, Victor crosses paths with Thomas. Thomas knows Victor’s father has died and that Victor needs cash, so he offers to lend Victor the money on the condition that he allows Thomas to travel with him to Phoenix. Since the two of them haven’t been good friends for some time, Victor hesitates. At home, however, Victor remembers highlights of his childhood friendship with Thomas—riding bikes, playing with fireworks, and wishing to be warriors. Victor reluctantly accepts Thomas’s offer, but as soon as he does, he remembers a time he nearly beat Thomas to death “for no reason at all” (65). None of his friends stepped in to stop the fight, and it took “a warrior,” Norma Many Horses, to end his assault.

Once in Phoenix, Victor smells his father’s trailer before reaching it. Both Victor and Thomas share apprehension about entering. As the two go inside, Victor recalls when Thomas dislodged Victor’s foot from an underground wasp nest; Victor sustained seven stings instead of dozens.

After finding little of value among Mr. Joseph’s possessions, Thomas tells a story. At 13, Thomas says, he acted on his dream to stand by the Spokane Falls and wait for a vision. After an hour, Victor’s dad arrived, took him to Denny’s for dinner, and drove him home. Thomas concludes that Mr. Joseph was his vision—a call for the folks on the reservation to “Take care of each other” (69), as Mr. Joseph himself had said of Thomas and Victor.

Carrying the $300 from Victor’s father’s account, Victor and Thomas begin their drive home in his dad’s old pickup. Victor does most of the driving, and as soon as Thomas takes the wheel, he runs over the only sign of life on the trip thus far—a jackrabbit. Thomas relays more of his biography and explains that his father was a World War II soldier who died serving in Japan and that his mother died in childbirth, leaving him orphaned. He concludes, “I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories” (73).

Back on the reservation, Thomas removes any expectation that Victor pay the money back. He also admits that he knows their trip won’t improve how Victor treats him. Victor feels ashamed but then hands Thomas one of the two boxes containing Victor’s father’s ashes. Thomas, elated, immediately makes plans to return to Spokane Falls to release the ashes and set Victor’s father’s spirit free to “rise like a salmon” (74). Before Victor leaves for his house, Thomas asks Victor, “[W]hen I’m telling a story somewhere, why don’t you stop and listen?” (74).

Victor’s aunt, Nezzy, is an excellent seamstress who makes authentic traditional clothing such as buckskin outfits and full-length beaded dresses. No one on the Spokane Reservation can afford them. One morning while Nezzy is sewing, her son passes gas so loudly that it startles a mouse straight up her pant leg. In order to get rid of the mouse, Nezzy undresses while her husband and son, Albert, laugh at the spectacle. The frightened mouse finally leaves the house, but Albert and Nezzy’s husband keep mocking her. Nezzy retaliates by cursing and calling them “ungrateful” (77). Albert apologizes, saying he didn’t mean what he said, to which she retorts, “And I didn’t mean to give birth to you” (78). She fantasizes that both her son and husband are gone, having been eaten by a hungry pterodactyl.

The narrative flashes back 30 years to a time when Nezzy and her husband were dancing at a bar. Nezzy had once been an accomplished dancer, teaching dance lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. However, when circumstances demanded it, she danced in a topless bar to earn money to feed her son. After leaving the bar drunk, Nezzy’s husband drove home recklessly and flipped the pickup over, throwing himself out of the truck and giving Nezzy a bloody face. Both of them recovered with only minor injuries.

After the mouse incident, Nezzy walks to Tshimikain Creek, removes all her clothes, and playfully splashes around until finally submerging herself to her chin. The creek water is brown and smells of “dead animal and uranium” (79-80), but Nezzy disregards this. Her husband and son track her down but fail to coax her back home.

Another flashback describes Nezzy giving birth to Albert in a delivery room so chaotic and irritating it resembled a “fun house.” The inexperienced Indian Health Service doctor barely caught Albert on his way out. Neither Nezzy nor Albert received proper care, and Nezzy considered naming her son “Potatoes […] Or maybe Albert” (82). Unbeknownst to Nezzy, her doctor tied her tubes immediately after the delivery; the hospital administration wanted her sterilized and got her to sign the papers under false pretenses.

Nezzy emerges from Tshimikain Creek after dark, gets dressed, and heads home. Without addressing her family, she dons a heavy beaded traditional dress she had sewn. She falls under its weight but refuses any help. She takes one slow step at a time until she begins dancing.

Heartbroken over a breakup, Victor turns to other women, dancing with 100 of them. When he tells a Lakota woman in Montana, “You’re beautiful,” she replies, “And you’re drunk” (83.) In his inebriated condition, Victor loses a sense of time and place, shouting random claims about his connection to historical events and pop icons.

Victor plaintively reminisces about his former girlfriend, who was “so white his reservation eyes suffered” (84). He recalls their conversation about Crazy Horse while standing by the river. He remembers the size of her hands, the contrast of their skin tones, how easily she fell asleep, and the sound of her breathing. His girlfriend was drawn to people who use cocaine, while Victor was drawn to drinking. She urged Victor to stop drinking, but Victor believed “one more beer” would make things right (88). Victor became increasingly disillusioned with life. He habitually fought insomnia as well as his girlfriend until one morning, without warning, she left.

In his girlfriend’s absence, Victor continues to combat insomnia, but he begins to get sober and secures new employment (having lost both his Tribal Cafe and BIA jobs). He imagines himself going for a run but promptly gets distracted by the color television. He flashes back to his childhood when he performed as a fancydancer. His parents’ pride in him and the love they displayed for each other when they were drunk comforts him.

At the story’s conclusion, Victor has scraped together enough coins to buy a bottle of wine. As he prepares to drink the bottle, a Cherokee man interrupts and tells Victor to “let it breathe” (90). The two enjoy each other’s company, exchange jokes, and share the bottle heartily. Victor winds up letting the stranger drink most of the bottle and begins to feel more hopeful for the future.

Thomas has been completely silent for more than 20 years following a run-in with the law—threatening the postmaster with “the idea of a gun” and talking about overhauling “tribal vision” (93). Now Thomas has again found himself charged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and put in prison. His “dangerous” truth-telling caused the tribal chairman’s wife to leave her husband, who called her a “savage in polyester pants” (94). In his bug-infested cell, Thomas opens himself up to channeling more stories. He responds strongly to each one. Certain he will be found guilty, he passes the night before trial counting stars from his prison window.

The traveling judge presiding over the trial begins by asking Thomas if he understands the charges against him. He states that he does not, but the judge bypasses this legal requirement to proceed to testimony. Thomas calls himself to the stand, telling three stories to a captive audience.

Thomas’s first story explains General George Wright’s movements against the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane people. The general stole 800 ponies from Chief Ti-co-ax and then killed them out of fear of stampede. Thomas says that he was one of only a few ponies left alive and describes his sadness at witnessing his family fall all around him. Thomas sustained injuries while resisting being broken but ultimately escaped, riding into “other histories” (98).

In the second account, Thomas is a Yakama man named Qualchan whose father Colonel Wright held hostage. Wright threatened to hang Qualchan’s father unless Qualchan came to Wright’s camp. Qualchan agreed, but Wright broke his promise and hanged Qualchan alongside six others. When the judge questions the relevance of this story, Thomas explains that the present-day city of Spokane is creating a golf course over the spot where Qualchan was hanged and is naming it after him. The courtroom is enlivened by Thomas’s story.

Cross-examination begins by asking where Thomas was on May 16, 1858. He states that his name was Wild Coyote and he was among a war party of 799 others engaging Colonel Steptoe near Rosalia, Washington. Distrusting the peace treaty, his party surrounded Steptoe’s men, killing many of them. Thomas/Wild Coyote confesses to killing two white soldiers during the battle: one by arrow and the other by gun. He sustained a bullet to the shoulder but survived until his friend recovered him from the battlefield.

Thomas receives “two concurrent life terms in the Walla Walla State Penitentiary” (102). He is transported to prison along with six other men, five of whom are people of color. The prisoners acknowledge Thomas’s storytelling celebrity and request a story. Thomas gladly obliges.

Thomas tells a story to the other prisoners on their way to the penitentiary. It is a fragmented apocalyptic vision in which the Earth has been wiped clean of white people and only Indigenous tribes remain. In the aftermath, Thomas and his people sift through the property and artifacts left behind, deciding to burn most of it. Thomas finds a transistor radio buried under old quilts. He is curious about its operability but too afraid to turn it on. His beloved, Tremble Dancer, makes her way to the reservation from the city. Unlike most of those coming from the cities, she is not sick, but her legs are burned badly. The “Skins”—those who were on the reservation when the world-changing event occurred—are cautioned against marrying “Urbans” like Tremble Dancer to avoid contagion and to prevent a “monster” from being born (106).

As seasons change, the elderly in the tribe fall ill. The Tribal Council judges that “it’s a white man’s disease in their blood” and orders the burning of the bodies of those afflicted, as well as their extended families’ (107). Thomas takes comfort in the fact that he is an orphan and will not have to witness his loved ones’ demise. Amid the devastation, Thomas dreams about television and wakes up in tears. Thomas’s friend lives outside the reservation and reports the region’s vast emptiness and silence. No signs of modernity remain, and only a single black flower flourishes.

Thomas reflects on his meetings with Tremble Dancer. Both are naked and take inventory of their body parts. Tremble Dancer believes her legs are disintegrating and worries that the rest of her will follow.

At another house burning, Thomas’s eyes settle on a painting of Jesus that has fallen to the floor. He is struck by Jesus’s overtly white appearance, likening him to a flame. Someone finds a “sin[ful]” watch (109), so deemed because of its impersonal and precise calculations of time.

In this post-apocalyptic setting, Thomas has a vision that transports him to the last millennium, where he encounters his ancestors. They ask if he remembers them or still fears them. He responds by running toward a tree and hiding. When the ancestors return they claim his friends, Noah and Tremble Dancer; they bring the latter back pregnant, and she gives birth to salmon, bleeding seawater as she dies.

The story ends with Thomas reexamining the transistor radio he found earlier. Even though there is no obvious damage, he determines that any flaws would exist internally. He turns the radio on to full volume but only hears the rise and fall of his breath.