Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie Page B

day—and crawled back into bed with his wife.
    “How’d it go?” she asked.
    “What?”
    “With Ed?” she asked. “How is he?”
    “Okay, I guess,” Joey said.
    “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
    “No,” he said.
    She kissed him and quickly fell back to sleep. Awake for hours more, Joey promised himself that he would never ask Big Ed about his late-night hoops practice. Every man must have his secrets, right? And every man was supposed to ignore every other man’s secrets. That’s how the game was supposed to be played.

IDOLATRY
    Marie waited for hours. That was okay. She was Indian and everything Indian—powwows, funerals, and weddings—required patience. This audition wasn’t Indian, but she was ready when they called her name.
    “What are you going to sing?” the British man asked.
    “Patsy Cline,” she said.
    “Let’s hear it.”
    She’d only sung the first verse before he stopped her.
    “You are a terrible singer,” he said. “Never sing again.”
    She knew this moment would be broadcast on national television. She’d already agreed to accept any humiliation.
    “But my friends, my voice coaches, my mother , they all say I’m great.”
    “They lied.”
    How many songs had Marie sung in her life? How many lies had she been told? On camera, Marie did the cruel math, rushed into the green room, and wept in her mother’s arms.
    In this world, we must love the liars or go unloved.

PROTEST
    My friend Jimmy was a pale Indian, though all of his brothers and sisters were dark. You might have wondered if Jimmy’s real father was a white guy. Some tribal members did wonder, but Jimmy had the same widow’s peak cowlick as his browner siblings. When he was little and living on the rez, Jimmy got teased a bunch. Other Indians called him Salt or Vanilla or Snow White, so yeah, he was insecure about his pigment. But he never would have admitted to that insecurity. Instead, he pretended to embrace it. He insisted on being called White Eagle Feather, or Eagle for short, like that was his real Indian name. But you don’t get to give yourself an Indian name, so most people ignored his wishes and still called him Jimmy. I was his best friend so I called him Eagle once in a while, but I usually called him Ego.
    Yeah, Jimmy caught a lot of shit, even from me. But I was also the one who convinced him to go to Spokane Community College.
    We shared a studio apartment in Hillyard, a poor neighborhood near the college, and went to class more often than not. Jimmy and I were studying auto repair and planned on opening a garage after we graduated. It was a small dream, I guess, but Jimmy acted like it was a supertraditional Indian thing.
    “A car won’t be a car after we work on it,” he said. “It won’t have horsepower. It will be a powerful horse.”
    It was a goofy thing to say, but Jimmy took it seriously. Almost overnight, Jimmy got political. It happens all the time in the Indian world, especially among the pale warriors. I think their radicalism becomes inversely proportional to their skin color. But Jimmy’s transformation was sadder than most. He became a community college rebel and started showing up to auto repair class shirtless and barefoot.
    “Shoes were invented by the white man,” he said.
    “Come on, Ego,” I said. “I like shoes. Everybody likes shoes.”
    But he stopped listening to my advice. He got all weird and fundamental. He became so Indian that he jaywalked constantly. He refused to obey traffic signals and would not defer to moving vehicles.
    “My tribal sovereignty isn’t only about the land,” he said. “As an Indian man, it’s also about the sovereignty of my body. And the space around my body. Because I am indigenous, I always get the right of way.”
    He also started challenging any white man in a uniform—security guards, cops, and firemen. He gave shit to postal workers.
    “Fuck them,” he said. “And their Nazi fucking shorts.”
    While running