In “Amusements,” Victor and his friend Sadie, while attending a carnival, see an Indian known as Dirty Joe passed out in a drunken stupor in the grass. In the morning, they find Julius “passed out on the living room floor.” They head out to the porch with their coffees, and another group of Indian kids walks by they recognize one of them as a third-grade girl named Lucy, who is “so good that she plays for the sixth grade boys’ team.” Victor and Adrian sip their coffees, hoping that Lucy “makes it all the way.” Julius Windmaker “stagger down the road, drunk as a skunk.” Victor and Adrian lament his lost potential, and head inside. The story flashes forward to a year later, where they are once again drinking Pepsis on the porch. They recognize one of them as Julius Windmaker, “the best basketball player on the reservation.” They muse about his potential and whether or not he’ll make it off the reservation and find basketball stardom. In “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore,” Victor and his friend Adrian are drinking Pepsis on Victor’s porch when they see a group of Indian boys walking by.
They go home together, but each find that they are disappointed by the other. In “Crazy Horse Dreams,” Victor meets an attractive and engaging Indian woman at a powwow. This story outlines the dissolution of Victor’s father’s marriage to Victor’s mother “when an Indian marriage starts to fall apart, it’s destructive Indians fight their way to the end, holding onto the last good thing, because our whole lives have to do with survival.” “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock” is an ode to Victor’s father, who was, according to Victor, “the perfect hippie during the sixties, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians.” Victor recollects nights when his father would come home drunk, and could only be comforted and lulled by Jimi Hendrix tapes. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Victor and his friends Junior Polatkin and Thomas Builds-the-Fire take drugs in hopes of each experiencing their own visions. In “Every Little Hurricane,” Alexie introduces the volatile world of Victor’s childhood-the Spokane Indian Reservation, 1976-when a hurricane “drops from the sky” during a raucous, drunken, violent party at Victor’s family’s HUD house.
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