The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: A Drug Called Tradition Summary & Analysis

Thomas Builds-the-Fire has been compensated by Washington Water Power, who paid him off in order to install ten power poles across land he’d inherited. He throws a party to celebrate. Victor, who narrates this story, and his friend Junior Polatkin are there, but they leave early go try some “new drugs” at Benjamin Lake and hopefully experience visions. Victor says that he hopes the experience will be “spiritual” and “very fucking Indian.”

After driving a little ways, the two boys see Thomas standing by the side of the road; he has left his own party in order to follow the two boys. Victor invites Thomas to join them at the lake, but the invitation comes with a condition: Thomas can only come if he promises not to tell any stories after he’s taken the drug. Thomas agrees. Victor gives Thomas the drug, a hallucinogen, and Junior asks him what he’s able to see. Thomas “poke[s]s his head through some wall into another, better world,” where he says he can see Victor—wearing braids, stealing a horse, riding by moonlight.

Junior asks Victor to give him some of the drug. Though Junior is driving, Victor obliges. The boys reach the lake, and Junior’s vision begins; he can see Thomas “dancing naked around a fire.” He describes his vision-Thomas as “tall and dark and fucking huge.”

Junior spins the car in circles through the empty fields near the lake, and Victor tells him to slow down. Both Junior and Thomas are consumed by their visions. Victor leans over to the driver’s seat to stop the car, and Junior jumps out and runs through the field. Victor follows him. Thomas drives up behind them; Victor tells him to stop the car, and asks him where he was going. Thomas replies that he was chasing his vision of Victor and his horse. Victor finally takes some of the drug, and “instantly” has a vision of Junior, standing on stage in blue jeans, strumming a guitar and singing about Crazy Horse.

The boys walk down to the lake. Thomas puts his feet in the water, and Junior and Victor sit on the hood of the car while the drugs wear off, drinking diet Pepsi and watching as Thomas talks to himself, “telling himself stories.” Victor and Junior speculate about why Thomas is the way he is. “Some people say he got dropped on his head when he was little. Some people think he’s magic,” Victor says, adding that he thinks both things are true. Thomas turns around, and asks the boys if they want to hear a story. They oblige him, and he begins.

Thomas tells a story of three Indian boys drinking diet Pepsi out by Benjamin Lake, “wearing only loincloths and braids.” The boys, Thomas says, “have decided to be real Indians tonight. They all want to have their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names.” In Thomas’s vision, the boys are all “carried away to the past, to the moment before any of them took their first drink of alcohol.” The boys sing, dance, drum, and steal horses.

After he is finished with his story, Thomas gets up and walks away. Victor regrets being cruel to Thomas as children; he notes that Thomas has always been kind to both him and Junior. Thomas turns around and yells to Victor and Junior, telling them “not to slow dance with [their] skeletons.”

Victor and Junior stay at the lake until the sun comes up, experiencing residual visions. The following day, the spiritual leader of the tribe, Big Mom, comes upon them, and tells them that she knows what they saw. She hands Victor a small drum that fits in the palm of his hand, and tells him to hang onto it in case he needs her; it is, she says, her “pager.” Victor, in the present, tells us that he’s never used the drum; Big Mom died, he says, a couple years ago. He still likes to keep the drum nearby, and calls it “the only religion [he has.]”