Into the Abyss

Outside a small town on an unnamed Indian reservation, 12 gleaming white windmills arrayed across a hilltop slice the air. They also slice through birds straying into their blades.

An old man tells how it is his work to gather hundreds of their mangled carcasses, as he has for many years. He was a young man when he grabbed this job no one – especially the local Indians – wanted.

But that was early in the 21st century, at the beginning of the Second Great Depression, and he was desperate. Now, many years later, it’s a “green world” full of windmills, and there are tens of thousands of bird-gatherers like him.

	“Blasphemy, New and Selected Stories” by Sherman Alexie Grove Press, $27, 465 pp.

He recalls the blustery winter day soon after starting his job when an old Indian with a shotgun appeared, singing what the young man somehow knew was a “death song.”

The old man pointed the shotgun at him. The young man pleaded for his life, but instead of shooting him, the gunman knelt in the bloodstained snow, caressing the feathered corpses, then fired round after round into a windmill that kept whirring overhead.

This haunting tale of isolation and loss, “Green World,” is included in Sherman Alexie’s “Blasphemy,” a collection of new and selected short stories by an award-winning master of the genre. He also is a novelist, screenwriter, poet and performance artist.

Alexie grew up on a reservation in Washington state, but his stories portray largely urban Indians straddling the chasm between the white world and the reservation they left or never really were a part of in the first place, though the yearning for it and a mythic past is still there. The characters are often a bleak lot – a senile old woman, an over-the-hill basketball star, a cheating wife, a scarred prizefighter.

Some of the stories are mere slips of several pages; there is one of novella length.

Throughout, Alexie’s passion and anger, edged with his famous sardonic wit and blessed with deep compassion, make “Blasphemy” a gripping and adventurous experience.

Robert Woltman is an Albuquerque writer and poet.