Flight by Sherman Alexie Read Free Book Online Page A

them downstairs for chocolate pudding.
    After they’re gone, the beautiful woman leans over me. She is my wife and I don’t know her.
    “Oh, Hank,” she says. “It’s so good to see you awake.”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “Are you contagious?” she asks.
    If you can catch crazy, I’m a walking epidemic.
    “It’s only a virus,” I say. “I don’t think you can catch what I have.”
    “Maybe I want to,” she says.
    I can’t believe this woman is my wife. She is beautiful. Black hair, blue eyes, pale skin. She is maybe the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person.
    I wonder if I’ll get to have sex with her.
    I know this sexy woman is Hank’s wife. But I’m Hank right now. And she loves him so she loves me, too. I wonder if she knows that Hank kills people. I wonder if she knows that Hank helped kill a man a few nights ago. I wonder if she would still love Hank if she knew. I suspect she might. I suspect she sees Hank as her protector, as her children’s protector.
    Hank makes the world safe. He is a good and loving husband and father. He is one hundred different versions of himself, and only one of them is a killer.
    “I hear you’re coming home,” my wife says.
    “I think so,” I say.
    “That’s good, we’ve missed you so much.”
    She kisses me on the mouth. It makes me feel powerful. I close my eyes again and kiss her back as hard as I can.
    God, I think I would kill for her kiss.

Seven
    I ’M RUNNING THROUGH THE dark. I run toward the sound of laughter. I run toward a bright light in the distance.
    I run super fast. And I wonder if I’m not running at all. What if I’m flying? What if I have become that bank guard’s bullet? What if I’m the bullet that blasted through my brain?
    But, wait, no, I suddenly burst through the bright light, which is really the opening of a buffalo-skin tepee, and I run outside and stop.
    I am standing in the middle of a gigantic Indian camp. And I don’t mean some Disneyland, Nickelodeon, roller-coaster, stuffed-animal, cotton-candy Indian camp.
    Nope.
    I am standing in the middle of a real Indian camp, complete with thousands of real Indian tepees and tens of thousands of real old-time Indians.
    The tepees go on forever. They’re grouped in little circles inside bigger circles inside the biggest circles. This camp sits beside a small river. Small dusty hills rise above the water. Thin dry trees cover the hills.
    I breathe dust; it makes mud in my mouth.
    And there are so many Indians.
    Yep, a bunch of real old-time Indians. I’m not exactly sure what year it is. It’s tough to tell the difference between seventeenth-and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Indians.
    These are how Indians used to be, how Indians are supposed to be. Justice always talked with admiration about Indians like this.
    These old-time Indians have dark skin. There aren’t any half-breed pale-beige green-eyed Indians here. Nope, unlike me, these Indians are the real deal.
    I don’t hear any of them speaking English. I don’t know what Indian language they are speaking. I can’t understand it, but all of them are speaking it. In fact, as I listen more closely, I realize these Indians—men, women, children, and old people—are speaking a bunch of different languages. So there are a lot of different tribes here.
    Even the dogs seem to be barking in Indian. And there are a lot of dogs, hundreds of dogs.
    And it stinks something fierce.
    There are tens of thousands of human beings living in close quarters in the summer heat. And yes, it has to be summer because the sun is huge in the blue sky and it must be about 120 degrees.
    So imagine a camp filled with tens of thousands of sweating Indians, dogs, and horses, along with what appears to be the rotting and drying corpses of hundreds of buffalo, deer, porcupines, badgers, squirrels, rats, and who-knows-what other animals, hanging on racks everywhere I look.
    These Indians eat a lot of meat.
    And deodorant has not been invented