The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Distances Summary & Analysis

Thomas Builds-the-Fire describes a vision of the world in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event in which “most of the white men died and most of the Indians lived.” He surmises that Custer is the culprit; “only Custer could have done something that backward,” he says. The only other possible reason for the event’s occurrence, he says, is that “maybe the Ghost Dance finally worked.”

The Tribal Council, Thomas says, “has ruled that anything to do with the whites has to be destroyed.” The nights are freezing, but the Indians, naked, burn down houses and everything in them. Thomas describes finding a small transistor radio in one house’s closet, “hidden away under a pile of old quilts.” Thomas longs to turn it on, but is afraid of what he might hear.

Thomas loves an Indian woman named Tremble Dancer—she is, he says, one of “the Urbans,” or city Indians who survived the event and found their way to the reservation after the cities fell. There are only about a “dozen” Urbans left, Thomas says, and they are all ill. Tremble Dancer is not sick, he says, but her legs are covered in burns and scars. “Skins,” Thomas says, or Indians who lived on the reservation already at the time of the event, are not permitted to marry Urbans because they are stricken by a “sickness.”

Thomas repeatedly “dream[s] about television [and wakes] up crying.”

The weather, Thomas says, is changing. The nights are cold and the days are hot. Dead bodies are burned; The Tribal Council believes that those who fall ill have become victims of “a white man’s disease.”

Thomas describes his affair with Tremble Dancer. They meet in secret to “climb the branches of tree[s] and hold each other.” Tremble Dancer tells Thomas that “[her] legs are leaving [her,]” and that the rest of her is soon to follow. She tells Thomas that she is “jealous” of his healthy body.

During the burning of another house, Thomas finds a painting of Jesus Christ. “Jesus is white,” Thomas says. During the burning, Thomas can see “every color but white.”

At night, Thomas says, he can “hear the horses exploding [and] the screams of children who are taken.” He describes the presence of “The Others,” Indians who have “come from a thousand years ago with arrow, bow, stone ax, large hands.” Sometimes The Others bring food and water, but often they are violent, and kill dissenters. One of the Others—presumably their leader—impregnates Tremble Dancer. She gives birth to “flopp[ing] salmon,” and shorty thereafter she dies.

At a Tribal Council meeting, an Indian man named Judas offers a watch he found to the tribal chairman, who describes it as “a white man artifact; a sin.” Thomas remembers watches—bygones, now—and how “they measured time exactly, coldly.”

Thomas holds the transistor radio in his hands, examining its perfect surface. He turns the radio on and cranks up the volume “until all [he can] hear [is] the in and out of [his] breath.”