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Sherman AlexieA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
When Zits opens his eyes again, he hears reveille. He awakens in a tent; he rises and looks outside, where he sees 100 U.S. Cavalry soldiers running around. Some of the soldiers laugh and gesture at Zits. Then, all of them begin to laugh and gesture. He realizes that the person whose body he’s now occupying is naked. He’s also an old, wrinkly man. He tries to rush back into his tent but only manages to limp. He looks for his uniform and puts it on. His fingers ache as he secures his snaps and buttons. He becomes frustrated as he continues to lose his grip on the buttons. He knows he’s late for reveille.
Outside the tent, he hears someone shout the name Gus. He doesn’t “connect” to that name, so he keeps walking and looks for his place within the row of lined soldiers (78). He thinks of when he was 12-year old Zits and went to New York with a group of other disadvantaged children from Seattle. A rich man paid for their trip. While at Newark Airport’s baggage claim, he watched a group of young soldiers play keepaway with another soldier’s bag. He recalls how young and childish they were, and that these are the boys who are sent away to fight wars and defend adults. He thinks of how backwards this is. Just then, someone yells at him, saying "Gus" again, and demands that he come forward.
The man who yells at him is “a little general dude with a mustache that probably weighs more than he does” (79). When Zits responds as Gus, he notices that he has an accent—Irish, perhaps. General Mustache introduces him to the soldiers as Augustus Sullivan—“the best Indian tracker in the entire U.S. Army” (79). He tells them about how a group of white settlers were attacked by indigenous people and describes how “[t]hose savages murdered twenty-five Christian folks” (80). Gus found the people who did it. They were living in a “camp on the Colorado River,” which is where Gus will lead them now (80).
Zits figures now that he controls Gus’ body, he can lead the soldiers away from the camp. Then again, he has no sense of direction anyway, which could be even more beneficial. After they set out, Zits tries to get lost, but “Gus won’t let [him]” (80). Gus’ memories become Zits’ memories. Zits now remembers the “[d]ead white bodies stripped naked and mutilated and ruined” (81). He remembers the little “blond, blue-eyed” white girl “still wearing her little blue gingham dress” (81). She died with three arrows in her belly, “clutching a rag doll” (81). Her mother, also blond and blue-eyed, was lying “two feet away,” with three arrows in her stomach, as well (81).
Zits insists that this sadness belongs only to Gus—not him. But, Gus’ “grief and rage are huge,” so his becomes huge, too (82). With that feeling, he leads 100 soldiers toward the Indian camp.
Zits, as Gus, takes 100 soldiers down the hill, charging toward the Indian camp. Zits is frightened and wants to stop this attack. Only 25 indigenous warriors are present to meet the white troops. Very few have rifles to match the soldiers’ firepower. The remainder are armed only with bows and arrows. A few soldiers are pierced with arrows, but the white men kill 11 indigenous warriors. Zits doesn’t kill anyone, but he feels complicit in the slaughter.
When the soldiers ride into the camp, he sees an arrangement of 20 to 30 tepees. The entire tribe, which neither Zits nor Gus can identify, is prepared to fight—including women and children. Zits sees a five-year old boy holding a bow and arrow, but he’s not strong enough to pull the bow-string and only bloodies his finger. Meanwhile, a white soldier tramples an old woman with his horse, while another chases a mother and her daughter. He catches up to the little girl and smashes her skull with the butt of his rifle. Another soldier “jumps up and down on the belly and chest of an old man” (85). Zits wishes that he could shoot himself or would at least go blind.
In the midst of Zits’ desperate thoughts, “a stray bullet strikes [his] horse” (86). The horse dies and he falls to the ground. He “[rolls] through a campfire and [lands] on a pile of dead bodies” (86). He sees the five-year old, whom he nicknames Bow Boy, running away. A young soldier runs after the child, but Bow Boy is fast—dodging, ducking, and weaving—and the soldier can’t catch him. Zits rises, determined to save Bow Boy, but his elderly body makes it difficult for him to move. Bow Boy falls. Zits braces himself to witness the child’s murder, but the white soldier instead “reaches down and picks up Bow Boy” (87). He runs toward the forest, along with the tribespeople, cradling the boy in one arm. Zits regards the soldier as “a small saint” for saving Bow Boy (87). The other troops haven’t yet noticed that Small Saint has escaped, but Zits is sure that he and the boy will soon be captured.
Zits finds a rifle on the ground, crawls over to a pony, and mounts it. He rides after Small Saint and Bow Boy. General Mustache has finally noticed that Small Saint is gone and identifies him as “a deserter” (89). He aims his rifle at Small Saint. Zits rushes toward him on the pony, screaming. He swings his rifle and hits General Mustache in the face with it, then rides after Small Saint and Bow Boy. Other cavalry soldiers ride in pursuit of Gus. The tribespeople run alongside him and fall to the ground, shot in a hail of gunfire.
Zits feels ambivalent. In the body of Gus, he wants “to turn around and re-swear [his] allegiance to the other soldiers,” but he knows that he’s doing the right thing by “trying to save the soldier who is trying to save Bow Boy” (89). He catches up to the pair. Small Saint first thinks that Gus is there to kill them until the old soldier reaches out his hand for Small Saint to grab. He hauls them up on the pony. As they race or the hills, behind them, they hear “the sounds of gunfire and hooves and curses [growing] fainter and fainter” (90). The pony leaps into the air, seeming to fly into the forest. They all then crash into the brush. Small Saint and Bow Boy begin to weep, “happy to be alive, however temporarily” (90).
The adrenaline leaves Gus’ body. Zits finds himself in terrible pain. His back “goes completely stiff” (92). His ribs hurt; he wonders if he cracked one or more of them from the impact of the fall. He struggles to breathe. He knows that if the cavalry caught up to them, he wouldn’t be able to fend them off. Slowly, the pain subsides from his back, though he still feels unprepared to stand. He sees Bow Boy curled up in Small Saint’s arms.
Small Saint tells Gus that they can’t remain where they are for much longer; the other soldiers will soon catch up to them. Zits looks at the rifle that he seized to smash General Mustache in the face. It’s “covered with buckskin and beads,” meaning that it was “an Indian warrior’s rifle” (93). Zits feels love for the weapon, which saved the trio—even though he never fired a bullet. He tells Small Saint and Bow Boy that he needs only a few more minutes to rest. Small Saint waits and then asks again if Gus is ready, worrying about the approaching army. Zits wants to move Gus’ body, but Gus just can’t summon the will to get up. Gus’ old ears can’t hear the approaching army as clearly as Small Saint can. Still, he knows the men are coming and that Small Saint and Bow Boy need him, so he rolls over onto his stomach, gets on his hands and knees, and rises, still in pain. He insists on walking, while Small Saint and Bow Boy ride the pony. Finally, he hears the cavalry approaching.
Zits asks Small Saint why he saved Bow Boy. Small Saint tells him that he “joined the military to defend people,” which is what he believes he’s doing (95). Zits feels that he will never be as honorable or courageous as Small Saint. He focuses on trying to instill his youth into Gus. By imposing his will onto the old man’s body, he gets Gus to jog alongside the pony. Then, he trips over a fallen branch on the forest floor, causing his back to stiffen again. This time, Gus screams and curls into a fetal position. Small Saint turns around on the horse and asks if he’s okay. Zits screams for him and Bow Boy to continue without him. Initially, Small Saint refuses and then obeys when Gus says please. Small Saint salutes the elderly soldier and then gallops away with the boy, “[disappearing] into the dark trees” (97). Meanwhile, the soldiers get closer.
Gus “[rolls] over on [his] stomach, and then [crawls] to a log” (97). He takes cover and props his rifle up onto the log. He’s not sure if the rifle still works, but he takes “aim at the tree line” (98). Zits wonders if God would approve of his killing one of these soldiers to help Small Saint and Bow Boy escape. He’s frightened and imagines the surrounding trees as “[a]n audience of eager giants” (98). A dozen soldiers appear and spot him near the log. They “curse and laugh,” giddy with the fact that they’ve caught him (98). General Mustache is among them, covered in “bloody bandages” (98). Zits aims at them, but doesn’t know if he “[has] the heart to kill them” (98). He hears screaming and realizes that they are his screams. He then hears weeping and realizes that it is his own weeping. He shuts his eyes.
In this section, Zits enters another vulnerable body—that of an old, arthritic soldier whose senses are failing him. As Gus Sullivan, Zits connects to his Irish heritage. Originally a marginalized people, one of the ways in which the Irish assimilated into white, mainstream America was to embrace concepts like Manifest Destiny—the belief that the United States should expand its border to the Pacific Ocean—and by participating in the removal of indigenous tribes from western lands.
The cavalrymen describe the members of the tribe as savages to make them seem devoid of context, making it easier to destroy them and the civilizations that they constructed. Gus fixates on the image of the dead blond, blue-eyed white woman and her identical, murdered daughter in an effort to seek justification for the Indian hunt. He and the other soldiers are defenders of white femininity. Their image of themselves as protectors of women—a role that Zits first understands when he enters Hank’s body—gives them a sense of purpose and helps them understand how to be men. Their sense of masculinity is, thus, codependent and relies, too, on others playing roles: Indians must be savages and women must be victims in need of rescue or retribution for their lost honor.
The dead woman and her daughter have each been shot with three arrows. For Christians, like the settlers, the number three has great Biblical significance. It alludes to the Holy Trinity, the three temptations of Christ, the Magi who appear after Christ is born, and the number of years in which Jesus proselytized.
Zits empathizes with Gus’ sense of loss over this woman and her daughter, despite his loyalty to his indigenous heritage. The experience of the battle on the frontier helps Zits understand the complexity of the confrontations between western Native American tribes and the white settlers, with neither group comprising only heroes or villains. Moreover, this real historical violence traumatizes Zits and helps him realize that the fantasies of retributive violence he explored with Justice did not account for the true brutality of mass violence.
By Sherman Alexie