The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Every Little Hurricane

This first story of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven introduces Victor, his parents, and his uncles, Arnold and Adolph, who are quarreling during a New Year's Eve party when Victor is nine years old in 1976. The weather forecast is for a hurricane, and the narrator surveys the bizarre behavior of many of the Indians on the reservation, many of them drunk and angry, recalling some wrong that had been done to them. The story also contains a flashback to when Victor was five years old and his parents could not afford to buy him anything for Christmas. Alexie introduces the themes he will develop throughout the book such as the relationship between the real and the imaginary, reservation poverty, and the idea of memory as an index of social and individual identity. Victor is a fictionalized version of Alexie, as the author has admitted.

A Drug Called Tradition

In this story, Thomas Builds-the-Fire is hosting the "second-largest party in reservation history." The first was the New Year's Eve party in the first story. Thomas, Junior, and Victor take a ride to Benjamin Lake, where they ingest an unspecified drug and proceed to have visions during which they earn their adult Indian names by stealing horses. Events from the past frequently bleed into the present during this story, illustrating Victor's claim that "Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you."

Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play "the Star Spangled Banner" At Woodstock

In this story, Victor recounts memories of his father coming home drunk during the 1960s and listening to Jimi Hendrix play "The Star Spangled Banner." As a child, Victor would share in his father's drunken ritual, putting the song on the stereo as he walked in the house, and then curling up and sleeping at his feet after he passed out. Jimi Hendrix, part Cherokee Indian, was a Seattle-born rock and roll star who gained fame for his masterful guitar playing. He died in 1970 at 27, choking on his own vomit while being taken to the hospital, purportedly due to drug abuse. Victor recounts that his father's love of Hendrix played a role in the breakup of his parents' marriage, as did his alcoholism and desire to be alone.

Crazy Horse Dreams

In this very short story, Victor relates an experience he had with a woman at a powwow. He draws on the image of Crazy Horse, a famous Sioux warrior, to show how contemporary Indian men cannot measure up to the ideal of Crazy Horse. The woman Victor meets at a fry bread stand and seduces wants him to be something he is not. "His hands were small. Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse."

The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Don't Flash Red Anymore

In this story, Victor and Adrian, reformed alcoholics, sit on their front porch, drink Pepsi, and discuss basketball and the reservation's rising star, Julius Windmaker, who, like Victor and other rising stars before him, eventually succumbs to alcoholism. The story ends with the two having a similar conversation about a talented young Indian girl named Lucy. Adrian and Victor hope that she can develop her talents and not begin drinking.

Amusements

In this story, Sadie and Victor play a prank on an old drunk Indian called Dirty Joe, putting him on a carnival ride when he passes out. A security guard chases Victor, who runs into the Fun House and sees his image distorted in "crazy mirrors."

This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

This is one of the stories adapted for the film Smoke Signals. After learning that his father has died in Phoenix, Arizona, Victor decides to retrieve his belongings and his ashes. Thomas Builds-the-Fire offers to give Victor the money to make the trip if he can go with him. The two retrieve Victor's father's ashes, a photo album, and his father's pick-up truck. Along the way, the two reminisce about Victor's father and reach an understanding of one another. At the end of the story, Victor offers Thomas some of his father's ashes.

The Fun House

In this character sketch of his Aunt Nezzy, Victor recounts an episode during which a mouse crawls up his aunt's leg, and her son and uncle mock her. Nezzy becomes fed up with her son and her husband's ingratitude, and leaves the house to swim naked in Tshimikain Creek, refusing to leave even when her husband and Victor plead with her. At sundown, she leaves the creek, but she also knows that her life will be changed as a result of the day.

All I Wanted to Do Was Dance

Victor recounts a number of drunken episodes from his life and how drinking destroyed his relationships and led to an all-consuming despair. He ends the story by describing the day he decided to stop drinking.

The Trial of Thomas Builds-The-Fire

In this fabulous story, Thomas Builds-the-Fire is put on trial for unspecified crimes, after he begins speaking following twenty years of silence. A man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs describes Thomas's behavior: "A storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth. Dangerous." The story contains passages from the court transcripts in which Thomas tells stories of white injustices to Indians from the nineteenth century, including an incident in 1858 in which Colonel George Wright steals 800 horses from the Spokane chief Til-coax. In this story, Thomas speaks as if channeling the voice of one of the ponies. In other stories, he speaks in the voice of those involved in the ensuing battle between the settlers and the Indians. Thomas Builds-the-Fire was sentenced to two concurrent life terms for his "crime."

Distances

In a collage of scenes, Victor describes the differences between "Urbans," Indians who left the reservation to live in the city, and "Skins," Indians who stayed on the reservation. He also describes burning down houses because white people had inhabited them, dancing with Tremble Dancer, an Urban, and assorted dreams about Indians from the past.

Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation

Containing elements of parable and allegory, this story covers the years 1966 – 1974 and chronicles the relationship between the narrator and an orphaned baby he adopts who takes on Christ-like characteristics. The baby's mother is Rosemary Morning Dove, who claimed she was a virgin when the baby was born, around Christmas. After a fire kills her and her lover, Frank Many Horses, the narrator adopts the baby, named James. A heavy drinker, the narrator quits in 1971 in order to keep James. The last three years of the story detail his life as a sober man and his growing relationship with James, whom he hopes will take care of him when he grows old.

A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result

On his birthday, Samuel Builds-the-Fire, grandfather to Thomas Builds-the-Fire, is laid off from his job cleaning rooms at a motel. Although he has never had an alcoholic drink his entire life, Samuel Builds-the-Fire drinks this day. He drinks so much he passes out on railroad tracks as a train approaches.

A Good Story

Quilts are used as a metaphor for the story's structure. Junior's mother, who is making a quilt, tells him all of his stories are sad, so Junior tries to tell one that is not. He relates a tale about Uncle Moses, and his nephew, Arnold, which ends with Uncle Moses beginning the very tale that Junior just told. This self-reflexive story underscores how storytelling helps to ensure the continuity of Indian identity.

The First All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue

This densely poetic story, the most upbeat in the entire collection, describes the event of its title. There are hot dogs, Pepsi, Kool-Aid, a horseshoe pitch competition, and talk of making basketball the new tribal religion.

Imagining the Reservation

Alexie explores the ways in which Indians use their imaginations to battle their culturally and physically impoverished lives on the reservation. His symbolic descriptions dart between "what if" fantasies of the past, memories of an impoverished childhood, and the reality of the present. As in other stories in the collection, Alexie peppers this one with allusions to popular culture such as television shows and rock and roll music. Addressing Adrian and writing, "I am in the 7-11 of my dreams, surrounded by five hundred years of convenient lies," the narrator underscores his belief that "imagination is the only weapon on the reservation."

The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor

The narrator, Jimmy Many Horses, who has cancer, describes his on-again, off-again relationship with his wife, Norma. She leaves him because he cannot stop joking about the terminal illness, saying that it is the size of a basketball, and that in an X-ray he could see the stitches on it. His wife returns to live with him at the end of the story because the person she was living with was "too serious."

Indian Education

This story is structured as a series of short descriptive vignettes, each depicting a grade in Victor's education, from first grade through twelfth. Recounting representative incidents from each grade that illustrate his life on the reservation, battles against discrimination, and hopes for the future, Victor describes himself as intelligent, athletic, and despairing.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

In this title story, Victor leaves the reservation to live in Seattle with his white girlfriend, who plays out the role of the Lone Ranger to Victor's Tonto. When the relationship sours, Victor returns to the reservation, stops drinking and finds a job answering phones for a high school exchange program.

Family Portrait

This story describes Junior's family members and their propensity for storytelling. It bears a remarkable similarity to the story Alexie tells about his own life. Alexie structures the story by "translating" what people say into what he heard. Superficially, he blames the sound from the alwayson television as distorting words. However, the television itself acts as a metaphor for how popular culture and European ways have ruined Indian traditions.

Somebody Kept Saying Powwow

In this story, Junior, an alter ego of Victor and Alexie, describes his experiences with Norma Many Horses. For Junior, she is a role model who epitomizes the right way to live. She neither drinks nor smokes, is honest to a fault, is confident of her Indian identity, and acts as a caretaker for other Indians on the reservation, who respectfully call her "grandmother." She calls Junior "Pete Rose," comparing Junior with the baseball player who is remembered more for his gambling than he is for his record-setting career.

Witnesses, Secret and Not

Victor is thirteen in this story, and he and his father are driving to the police station so that the police can ask his father questions about a missing Indian, Jerry Vincent, who was supposedly killed ten years earlier. His father narrowly escapes crashing the car, after skidding on the icy road. At the police station, Victor's father repeats what he has told the police numerous times before: he knows nothing about Jerry Vincent other than what he has already told them. The father admits to Victor on the drive home that he was involved in a car accident once in which a white man was killed, but he was never arrested because the white man had been drinking. The story ends when the two return home and Victor's father cries into his food.

Media Adaptations

• Directed by Chris Eyre and winner of two Sun-dance Film Festival awards, Smoke Signals (1998) is adapted from stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It is available at most video stores and many libraries.