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going to keep quiet about this, he said.
    I stared at the pistol in his hand. He saw me staring at the pistol in his hand. I knew he was deciding whether to kill me or not. And I guess his love for me, or whatever it was that he called love, won him over. He turned and threw the gun as far as he could into the dark.
    We drove back down that dirt road in silence. As he dropped me at my house, he cried a little, his first sign of weakness, and hugged me.
    You owe me, he said again.
    After he drove away, I climbed on the roof of my house. I don’t know why I did that. It seemed like the right thing to do. Folks would later call me Snoopy, and I would laugh with them, but at the time it seemed like such an utterly serious act.
    I suppose, even if it became funny later, that it was the ultimate serious act.
    I needed to be in a place where I had never been before to think about the grotesquely new thing that had happened, and what I needed to do about it.
    I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke, cold and wet, the next morning, climbed off the roof, and went to the tribal police. A couple hours after I told them the story, the Feds showed up. And a few hours after that, I led them all to Dr. Bob’s body.
    Later that night, as the police lay siege to his trailer house, Junior shot himself in the head.
    No way I’m going back to prison, he said.
    I wasn’t charged with any crime. I could have been, I suppose, and maybe should have been. But I guess I’d done the right thing, or maybe something close enough to the right thing.
    And Jeri? She left the rez, of course. I hear she’s working on another rez down south. I pray that she never falls in love again. I’m not blaming her for what happened. I just think she’s better off alone. Who isn’t better off alone?
    I didn’t go to Junior’s funeral. I figured somebody might shoot me if I did. Most everybody thought I was evil for turning against Junior. Meaning: I was the bad guy because I betrayed another Indian.
    And yes, it’s true that I betrayed Junior. But if betrayal can be righteous, then I believe I was righteous. But who knows except God?
    Anyway, in honor of Junior, I started war dancing. I had to buy my regalia from a Sioux Indian who didn’t give a shit about my troubles, but that was okay. I think the Sioux make the best outfits anyway.
    So I danced. Well, I practiced dancing first in front of a mirror. I’d put a powwow CD in my computer and I’d stumble in circles around my living room. After a few months of this, I got enough grace and courage to make my public debut.
    It was a minor powwow in the high school gym. Just another social event during a boring early December.
    At first, nobody recognized me. I’d war-painted my whole face black. I wanted to look like a villain, I guess.
    Anyway, as I danced, a few women recognized me and started talking to everybody around them. Soon enough, the whole powwow knew it was me swinging my feathers. A few folks jeered and threw curses my way. But most just watched me. I felt the aboriginal heat of their eyes. And I started crying. I’d like to think that I was weeping for my lost cousin, but I think I was weeping for my whole tribe.

    SHERMAN ALEXIE is the best-selling author of War Dances , winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He is also the author of Reservation Blues, Indian Killer, The Toughest Indian in the World, Ten Little Indians, Flight, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Business of Fancy-dancing , and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Also a filmmaker, stand-up comic, and public speaker, Alexie lives in Seattle, WA, with his wife and two sons.

bad
    by jerry stahl
    T HE RUSH! THE TERROR! The acrid stink of your sweat soaking through furniture three blocks away! Speaking of stink—what is that? Did somebody piss under your arms? Is