Oh Jesus I wake up on the bottom of that mass grave with the bones of generations of slaughter…like the heroin addict said I just want to be pure.

Jesse WildShoe died last night and today was the funeral and usually there's a wake…we buried Jesse right away and dug the hole deep because Jesse could fancy dance like God had touched his feet…I don't know anything about religion and I don't confess my sins to anybody except the walls and the wood stove and James who forgives everything like a rock…One night I get so drunk I leave him at somebody's house and forget all about him…The tribal police drag me into the cell for abandonment and I'm asking them who they're going to arrest for abandoning me…I've got the DTs so bad…my shoes squeal and kick and pull me down into the dead pig pit of my imagination. Here's a selection from this story, which formally could easily be called experimental, though I rarely hear that word when Alexie is spoken about. The narrator is trying to take care of the baby, but he's failing. It's about a baby who is really the narrator who is really the author who was born with a defect (he clues us in on this the by telling us that the baby was born in 1966-the year of Alexie's birth).

Let's look at one of my favorite stories from this collection, 'Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation.' Just the title alone is a poem. Set in urban areas and on the reservation, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a brilliant, gritty collection of short stories that was originally based on a dream of Alexie's, during a time in his early twenties when he was a heavy, heavy drinker. But there are stories that you can't get over, that are exploding with beauty, stories that haunt me and have for twenty years. Lone Ranger doesn't have the crisp brutality and poetry of Diaz's Drown (1996) (yet another writer whose behavior has come to light), nor the impeccable polish of Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999). My history, and it is the history of so many female writers, is intertwined with his. Even though the book had been so fundamental to my development as a writer, I decided I would not teach his book again, not until he is gone-he was not allowed to take that beauty from me. When I decided to write this, I had fully come to understand the import of what the author had given to me. Though it will come as a surprise to many, my favorite short story collection after all this time is still Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993).

Sherman alexie the lone ranger