The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Witnesses, Secret and Not Summary & Analysis

It is 1979, and the young unnamed narrator is “learning how to be thirteen.” He is trying to figure out what it means to be a boy, a man, and an Indian. “And of course,” he says now—narrating from twelve years into the future—“I had to understand what it meant when my father got a phone call [from the Secret Witness Program in Spokane] one night out on the reservation.” Someone has turned the narrator’s father’s name into the police, along with the knowledge that he might have answers about the ten-years-passed disappearance of a man named Jerry Vincent.

The next day, on the drive into Spokane, the narrator asks his father a barrage of questions. His father reveals that he was in the same bar as Jerry on the night of his disappearance. The two were “mostly” friends, he says, and “nobody knows for sure” what happened to him. The narrator’s father tells him that Jerry “wasn’t the first one to disappear like that,” citing relocation programs that “sent reservation Indians to the cities” and sometimes “swallowed [them] up.” The narrator’s father admits that he left the reservation for a few years as part of one of these programs and that, when he returned, “everybody [had] heard [he] was dead [or] disappeared.”

The narrator’s father hits a patch of ice, and their car skids wildly, but doesn’t crash. The narrator wonders “if a near accident is an accident, if standing next to a disaster makes you part of the disaster.” The narrator and his father continue talking about Jerry Vincent. His father insists that he has told the police the same story many times, and that though he knows how Jerry Vincent died—shot in the head in an alley behind a bar—he does not know who killed him, and he only knows the story of his death “because every Indian knows the story.” The narrator notes that his father “has the whole thing memorized.”

On the drive into Spokane, the narrator and his father see an Indian man they know—they call him Jimmy Shit Pants. He is drunk, and the narrator and his father give him some money, then “dr[ive] off and [leave] Jimmy to make his own decisions. That’s how it is. One Indian doesn’t tell another what to do. We just watch things happen.”

The narrator’s father is not due at the police station for another hour, so he takes his son to get some food. While eating, the narrator asks his father whether he would tell the police if he knew who killed Jerry Vincent. the narrator’s father says he wouldn’t, because “they [don’t] care much anyway [and would just make more trouble for Indians.” The narrator asks his father if he has ever killed anyone. His father says that once, in a car crash, he killed a white driver accidentally. Because the man was intoxicated, and the narrator’s father was sober, he bore no responsibility in the man’s death.

The narrator and his father arrive at the police station, and the narrator’ father tells him to wait in the car. The narrator watches his father as he walks into the station, and thinks he “look[s] as Indian as you can get; off the reservation, among all the white people, every Indian gets exaggerated.” The narrator imagines what his father is doing inside the police station, and eventually, spurred by boredom and the cold, gets out of the car and goes inside, where his father is still waiting to meet with the police.

A detective arrives and greets the narrator and his father. He takes them into an office, and proceeds to question the narrator’s father, who has nothing new to add, and who tells the detective that he’s been questioned “annually.” The detective offers the narrator candy, but his father intervenes, explaining to the detective that he and his son are both diabetics. With nothing else to ask, the detective dismisses the narrator and his father.

On the drive home, the narrator recalls, there “wasn’t much to say,” and wonders “at what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives.” He thinks that “sometimes it seems like all Indians can do is talk about the disappeared.” When the narrator and his father arrive home, the narrator’s mother has fry bread waiting for them to eat. The narrator’s brothers and sisters watch television and play cards. The narrator’s father sits at the table and cries into his food while his family watches.