Sherman's March

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The response to Smoke Signals also showed Alexie the cultural power of film, something he never experienced with his books. "Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the character, has become a huge cultural character in the Indian world," Alexie says. "Our heroes have always been guys with guns. And now, to have this androgynous little storytelling bookworm geek––I think that’s wonderful."

His fiction has since become bigger, more daring, more surreal. He now traffics in huge metaphors and characters who engage in strange, archetypal, and at times desperate bids for intimacy or a sense of personal context. In The Toughest Indian in the World, there is a road-trip story, "South by Southwest," similar in ways to Smoke Signals, but Victor and Thomas have been replaced by a nutty white guy named Seymour and a fat Indian whom Seymour nicknames Salmon Boy. They kiss in the front seat of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu on their way to a McDonald’s in Tucson, Arizona. Seymour and Salmon Boy meet when Seymour attempts to rob a pancake house, Pulp Fiction style. He takes $42 in change from the customers and then says he needs someone to go with him to Arizona, someone who will fall in love with him along the way. Salmon Boy is the only volunteer.

"Are you gay?" Seymour asks. "I’m not gay."

"No sir, I am not a homosexual," Salmon Boy says. "I am not a homosexual, but I do believe in the power of love."

Throughout the collection, Alexie calls on his own brand of magic realism, as if these weren’t modern short stories at all, but indigenous folk tales that have been passed down through the ages. He mixes mythic references to salmon and constellations with the tragedies, foibles, and occasional victories of real Indian life. He weaves in and out of Indian stereotypes, setting them up, teasing the reader with them, destroying them, and then referring back to them, as if to say that, somewhere between what is thought to be true of precolonial Indians and what is seen of today’s Indians, lies the ultimate truth. It’s a trickster’s sleight of hand that messes with reality and allows Alexie to get away with fiction that feels purposefully timeless.

Homosexuality informs many of the stories in The Toughest Indian in the World. The title story is about an Indian journalist who picks up an Indian boxer who is hitchhiking. The tired, conflicted writer is in awe of what he perceives as the fighter’s mythic purity. "You’d have been a warrior in the old days, enit?" the journalist says. "You would’ve been a killer. You would’ve stole everybody’s horses." The story explodes when they share a hotel room and, late at night, the fighter—who, it turns out, is gay—climbs into the writer’s bed and coaxes the journalist into a new experience.

"I’m becoming more urban and also spending more and more time in the art world, which, you know, is heavily populated by homosexuals," Alexie says. "So, simply, my experiences have grown, so the characters represented in my fiction will grow accordingly. And one of the hatreds that bothers me the most is homophobia. In some sense I wanted to use my fiction as a way of addressing that directly, by celebrating [homosexuality] in all of its forms and including it as just another aspect of love."

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