Indian Killer

  “Right there,” Daniel whispered as Olivia gently pushed him onto his back.

  “I know, I know,” she said as Daniel closed his eyes and fell back to sleep.

  Wide awake now, she walked downstairs into the kitchen for a glass of milk. She opened the fridge and saw that the leftover roast had been cut into. She then saw the carving knife dropped carelessly into the sink. Daniel’s midnight snack. No wonder he was dreaming, Olivia thought as she washed the knife and replaced it in the cutting block.

  14

  Blank Pages

  WILSON WOKE SLOWLY, KEEPING his eyes closed even as he drifted into consciousness. The clock radio beside the bed was playing a song about fire and rain. Sunlight filtered softly through his closed eyelids, creating a fireworks display. The next-door neighbor’s dog barked through the thin walls of the apartment complex. No pets allowed, but Wilson did not mind the dog. He had often considered getting a dog himself. The garbage truck two blocks away rumbled through gears. The smell of eggs and hamburger from the apartment below him. A mother and father, two boys, down there in such a small space, a one-bedroom only a little larger than Wilson’s studio. They were never loud, never bothersome. Wilson heard only the faint metallic music of the boys’ video game, Nintendo or some such thing. The mother, Janice, picked up Wilson’s mail when he was away, though he rarely was. She would deliver it to him neatly wrapped in one of those huge rubber bands that seem to have no other use than wrapping up large bundles of mail. He wondered how Janice fit her husband, two sons, all the eggs and hamburger, and those huge rubber bands into that little apartment.

  He remembered other mornings, waking up, wondering which foster parents were keeping him, surrounding him with their space. He often forgot. One day the O’Gradys’ large house, and then he was in the Smiths’ tiny place the next morning, waking up in the same bed with Stuart Smith, who wet the bed. No. Wilson wet the bed but always blamed it on Stuart. After he moved from the Smith house, Wilson slept alone and could not blame it on anybody else. The Johnsons were kind and considerate about Wilson’s bed-wetting. Mrs. Johnson slipped a shower curtain between the sheets and mattress when she made the bed, and washed the soiled sheets without saying a word. The Sheldons were cruel. Mr. Sheldon shamed him. Mrs. Sheldon made him wash the sheets himself by hand. Some nights, he was forced to sleep in the bathtub, without blankets, sheets, or pillow, because he had ruined so many. The Hawkinses simply made him sleep in the same wet sheets night after night. The Crowleys locked him in a dark closet for hours at a time.

  As a teenager, Wilson had learned to control his bladder on most nights. But when he did wet his bed, he woke up early and washed the sheets. During sleep-overs with friends, he stayed awake all night, terrified to fall asleep. While living with the Lambeers, he’d once fallen asleep on the floor during an overnight birthday party and stained a shag carpet. His new friends had promptly and completely ostracized him after that. Alone and frightened, he made friends with family pets, and if those family pets sometimes ignored him, Wilson kicked them. Their yelps of pain made him feel better. Or he led the dogs and cats miles away from the houses, tied them to traffic signs, and walked away. They came back, or they didn’t. Wilson had once set a bowl of antifreeze in front of a family dog and watched happily as the dog lapped it up.

  Now, as an adult, Wilson tried to forget all that, but once in a while he still woke up with a start, worried that he’d wet the bed yet again. He’d woken up that morning, touched his crotch and the sheets beneath him, and breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been up late working on his novel, Indian Killer. With his other novels, he usually wrote about five pages a day, but he had managed to fill only a single page of Indian Killer before he forced himself to bed at 3 A.M. He’d only written ten very rough pages since he had talked to the desk sergeant about the killings. Up late every night, trying to finish. So much pressure, so many monsters. Wilson wondered about a woman, a wife, calling him to bed. Would she have let him stay up until three in the morning? He was frightened by the thought, by a woman. He thought of Beautiful Mary pushing him into that doorway, how she held his penis with her callused hand. He saw her scarred face and her dead eyes. He trembled at the memory and wondered if he would sleep. As it was, Wilson crawled into cold sheets and lay there wide awake for hours before sleep surprised him and dragged him off into the dark. He had never remembered his dreams very well, but last night, he knew he had fought off a variety of faceless monsters. Then he had dreamed about the murders. To his surprise, Wilson had dreamed of David Rogers’s face as a bullet passed through his brain, had seen the blood fountain from Justin Summers’s belly, had heard the muffled cries of Mark Jones. Now Wilson’s arms and legs felt sore.

  Wilson kept his eyes closed. He ran his hands over his body, searching for strange bumps and growths. He was getting to be that age and had to be more careful. Any change, however slight, was cause for concern. No pain, nothing new there, no growths, no tumors, no chemotherapy, no hair falling out, no funeral with his fellow officers in their dress blues telling funny stories and outright lies about his worth as a human being.

  Wilson opened his eyes. He was hungry. He slid out of bed, stepped into clean blue slippers, went to the bathroom, and washed his face. The newspaper was waiting for him just outside his front door. The delivery guy always folded it strangely. It must have something to do with the union, Wilson thought. He thought that every morning. He read the front-page headlines about the Indian Killer as he walked over to the little kitchen area, poured Grape-Nuts and one-percent into one of his two bowls, pulled one of his spoons from the drawer, and sat down to eat.

  Along with speculation about the identity of the Indian Killer came the disturbing news of several racially motivated attacks. An Indian man had been attacked on the Burke-Gilman Trail by three masked men swinging baseball bats. An Indian couple had been brutally beaten by those masked men and were now in the hospital with fractured skulls and other injuries.

  Wilson finished the newspaper and breakfast, washed the bowl and spoon, and dressed. He had work to do. He combed his hair, brushed his teeth, locked the apartment door behind him, and caught a bus downtown to Occidental Park in Pioneer Square. It had been more than ten years since he’d walked a beat in the Square. But he knew the street where the homeless Indians still hung out, and they could have some answers.

  He stepped off the bus a couple blocks away from Occidental Park and heard the music. It was a Thursday. Wilson remembered that the Pioneer Square Business Owners Committee had decided, whatever the weather, to hold outdoor concerts in Occidental Park every Thursday at noon. It was not much of a park, one city block filled with benches and bad publicly funded sculpture. No grass and no flowers, just red brick pavement covered with cigarette butts and graffiti. Skinny trees grew at regular intervals. The merchants had convinced the city that holding concerts in the park would attract more tourists to the downtown area, but there was a problem. Occidental Park was a gathering place for dozens of homeless people. So every Thursday morning around ten, the Seattle Police Department quietly drove the homeless out of the park. By noon, it would be filled with tourists. Around one in the afternoon, the homeless would begin filtering back in. By five, the park would once again belong to the street people.

  Wilson walked into the park just as the street people were starting to return. Due to the Indian Killer threat, police patrols had been increased, and five cops walked through the park. Some band played an unidentifiable mix of trumpets, piano, strange-looking guitars, and voices. Everybody in the band was white. One homeless white guy in a wheelchair had rolled himself right next to the stage. He was loudly singing along with the band. The musicians gave him angry looks, but the homeless guy was probably a better singer than any of them. Wilson watched that scene for a while, but he was looking for Indians. A few dozen Indians were regulars in and around Pioneer Square, as Indians had been when Wilson was a rookie cop. Some of those walking slowly in the Square were the sons and
daughters of Indians from Wilson’s youth.

  A local phone company had set up a promotional display at the south end of the park. Anyone could make a free three-minute long-distance call to anywhere in the country. All people had to do was to leave their names and current phone numbers, so they could be subjected to dozens of calls from minimum-wage telephone solicitors. There were six telephones and a pile of directories. A smiling woman answered questions.

  Wilson sat on a bench near the telephones. For a while, he watched tourists surprising people back home. One vacationing man made an anonymous semi-obscene phone call to his boss back in Wisconsin. Amused and bored at the same time, Wilson was about to leave when he noticed an Indian man leaning against a tree about twenty feet from the phones. He was obviously homeless. Dressed in dirty clothes, shoes taped together, broken veins and deep creases crossing his face. The Indian might have been twenty or fifty. There was no way of knowing for sure. Slowly, the Indian man made his way closer to the phones. Wilson watched him. The Indian stood next to a traveling salesman making a call home to his wife. Wilson stood up and carefully walked closer. He did not want to scare the Indian guy away. Wilson felt he still looked like a cop.

  “Yeah, it’s been fun,” said the salesman into the telephone. “It’s been raining a little, but not like they say. I could see the mountains. Yeah, this Indian Killer thing is going on. No, I’m not worried. You know how it is.”

  As the businessman talked, the Indian moved closer to the phone. Wilson moved closer, too. The Indian smelled bad. The businessman wrinkled his nose, finished his conversation, hung up the phone. He looked at the Indian with disdain, and then quickly walked away. The Indian picked up the phone and held it to his ear.

  “Can I help you, sir?” asked the telephone woman. She looked at the Indian as if he were contagious. She said “sir” like anybody else would have said “asshole.” She wondered if he was the Indian Killer, but decided this man couldn’t have hurt anyone in his condition.

  “I want to make a call,” said the Indian.

  “And where might you be calling?” asked the telephone woman.

  “Home,” said the Indian. “My reservation.”

  “And where, precisely, is your reservation, sir?”

  “Montana.”

  The telephone woman assessed him. This promotion was certainly not targeted at him. But she was just a temporary employee anyway, and who wants to get into an argument with a homeless Indian in downtown Seattle? She read from her list of questions.

  “Sir, who’s your current long-distance carrier?”

  “What?” asked the Indian.

  “Who’s your current long-distance carrier?”

  “Oh. The Moccasin Telegraph.”

  “Are you happy with their service?”

  “You bet. They’re loud and proud.”

  “And what other long-distance carriers have you had?”

  “Oh. You mean like smoke signals?”

  “Sure, like smoke signals.”

  “Well, then, I had smoke signals.”

  “And were you happy with their service?”

  “Damn right I was.”

  “Have you ever employed Pacific Sun as your long-distance carrier?”

  “No, who’s that?”

  “We’re Pacific Sun, sir. Would you ever consider using our service?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, then,” said the telephone woman as she handed the Indian a clipboard and pen. “Sign here and fill in your address and current phone number here.”

  “No problem,” said the Indian as he filled out the form with bogus information.

  “Use that phone there,” the telephone woman said. “You’ve got three minutes.”

  Amazed, Wilson watched as the Indian dialed the telephone, surprised the telephone woman had played along. The Indian closed his eyes in concentration, slowly pulling each digit from some phone number in his past. Wilson wanted to know who the Indian was calling. A grandmother? Parents? Lover?

  As Wilson edged closer and eavesdropped on the conversation, Marie Polatkin watched it all from across the street. She was sitting in her sandwich van, waiting for the concert to end. The ten-year-old van was white, with “Seattle Open Heart Mission” painted crudely on both sides. Inside the van, there was a driver’s seat, a passenger seat, and a dozen bakery racks, enough to hold hundreds of sandwiches.

  Marie had been watching Wilson since he first walked into the park. She had recognized him from the author photograph on the back of his book she’d been forced to study in her Native American literature class. Dr. Mather had told the class that Wilson was going to be giving a public reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company soon, and he was giving extra credit to anybody who attended. Marie planned to go, but she certainly wasn’t going to sit quietly and listen to Wilson tell lies. She had read some interview where Wilson had proudly revealed that his great-grandfather or uncle or somebody had a little Indian blood. She couldn’t understand the gall of such people. After all, she had a little bit of white blood, but that damn sure did not make her white. She looked in the rearview mirror of the van and saw what anyone would see reflected, an Indian woman. Dark eyes and hair, brown skin. She could not be white if she wanted to be white. And she had wanted to be white more than once. When she was nine years old, sitting on the front porch, she had rubbed her face with a piece of her dad’s sandpaper, trying to get rid of her color. Her skin was raw and bloody when she quit, still Indian. Now she was proud of being Indian, but it wasn’t a simple feeling. In the eyes of the white world, any Indian woman was the same as all other Indian women. Only white people got to be individuals. They could be anybody they wanted to be. White people, especially those with the most minute amount of tribal blood, thought they became Indian just by saying they were Indian. A number of those pretend Indians called themselves mixed-bloods and wrote books about the pain of living in both the Indian and white worlds. Those mixed-blood writers never admitted their pale skin was a luxury. After all, Marie couldn’t dress up like a white woman when she went to job interviews. But a mixed-blood writer could put on a buckskin jacket, a few turquoise rings, braid his hair, and he’d suddenly be an Indian. Those mixed-bloods could choose to be Indian or white, depending on the social or business situation. Marie never had the opportunity to make that choice. She was a brown baby at birth, born to a brown mother and brown father.

  “Vulture,” Marie said to herself as she watched Wilson inch closer to the Indian man on the phone. Marie knew he was King, a Flathead from Arlee, Montana. Jesus, Marie thought, if that white guy gets any closer to King, they’re going to be dancing.

  “Nah, I’m okay,” King said to the person on the other end of the phone line. “Yeah, been saving up some coins. Thinking about coming back home, you know?”

  King had left the reservation in 1980 to attend college and become a teacher. He had made it through one semester before he ran out of money. Too ashamed to return to the reservation, he’d worked on a fishing boat for a few years, then was struck by a hit-and-run driver while on shore leave. Too injured to work, without access to disability or workers’ compensation, King had been homeless for most of the last ten years.

  “Sir,” said the telephone woman. “Your three minutes are up. We have to close up shop.”

  “Okay, okay,” King told the woman, then said a few more words into the phone and quietly hung up. He cleared his throat, blinked back tears, and walked away.

  Wilson began to picture the Indian Killer using the free telephones. But who would he call? An ancient ancestor, somebody from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a wise old medicine man? Maybe a medicine man who was murdered by white people. The medicine man wants the Indian Killer to get revenge. Wilson cursed himself for not bringing along a notebook. Walking north out of the park, he hoped he could catch the next bus home to write this down.

  With head low and shoulders hunched, King walked south across the street toward the sandwich van. His t
elephone call had been a failure. He had talked to a stranger, a young boy, maybe fourteen. An Indian stranger, but still a stranger. King had dialed that number hoping to hear his sister on the other end of the line, but it was some other Indian. It was a number on the Flathead Reservation, King’s rez, but it wasn’t his family’s number. A Flathead boy answered but did not know if any of King’s relatives still lived on the reservation. Maybe all of his relatives had left. Disappeared, or died. The Indian boy had been polite and had listened to King rattle on for three minutes. The boy had even asked about King’s health. Somebody had taught that little Flathead boy how to be a good Indian.

  “Hey, King,” said Marie. She was leaning out the window of her van, holding a couple of sandwiches. Her glasses were slipping off the bridge of her nose, but she couldn’t do much about it with sandwiches in one hand, the other hand clutching the steering wheel as she leaned out the window.

  “Marie,” said King. “What kind you got?”

  “Ham and cheese, turkey and Swiss. And peanut butter and jelly.”

  “Jeez, ain’t had P.B. and J. in a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “A long time,” said King, stretching out the vowel sounds.

  “Well,” said Marie. “Come sit in the truck with me. I can’t feed anybody until the band leaves anyhow. Give me some company, enit?”

  “Enit,” said King. He climbed into the cab. He smelled bad, but Marie was almost used to it. The band played horrible music for another hour, as the tourists left the park by twos and threes. Marie gave sandwiches to a few men and women who recognized the van. Clouds arrived. Rain fell. A light rain. Enough to make you consider a heavier coat, but not enough to make you wear one. The tourists were gone; the homeless had returned. Marie wanted, just once, to have enough sandwiches. There were never enough sandwiches. King kept telling her stories about his reservation and she kept smiling.