Indian Killer
“Shut the fuck up,” Reggie said. “He’s a cop.”
“An ex-cop,” corrected Ty. Reggie silenced him with a rude hand gesture. Reggie took another step closer to Wilson, who reached further into his jacket. Reggie noticed and reached inside his jacket.
Nobody moved or said a word. Wilson looked around the room. The Indians stared at him with suspicion, bemusement, anger, and outright disgust. Wilson knew he had crossed some invisible boundary. His presence in the bar had been tolerated only because he had agreed to the terms of an unwritten treaty. Now he had broken the rules and smashed the treaty into pieces. Wilson could hear the alarms ringing in his head. He was not surprised that they sounded like drums. With his hand inside his jacket, he edged toward the door.
“You ain’t being so friendly now, Casper,” said Reggie, cutting off Wilson’s path to the door. Wilson glanced at Ty, who took a few steps backward. Good, thought Wilson, he was not going to get involved. Yet Wilson still felt like an idiot. He knew he had taken everything for granted. He was all alone in a hostile place.
“You think you’re so smart,” said Reggie. “You come in here acting all Indian, thinking you fit in, thinking you belong. I got news for you, Casper. We only let you hang around because it was fun to pitch you shit. You just ate all of that shit up and swallowed it down. You just took our shit and bought us drinks. We’ve been playing you hard, Casper. You don’t belong here, man, you never did.”
“Reggie,” said Wilson, searching for a way out. “I’m trying to decide if you’ve got a gun in your jacket. Maybe a blade instead. Or maybe you’re bluffing. Maybe it’s just your wallet. Or your comb. And I bet you’re wondering what I have my hand on, aren’t you? Do I have a knife, a pistol? I’m an ex-cop. I got to have a piece, right? Now, I was never Billy the Kid when I was working, and I’ve gotten older and slower, but I’m willing to bet that I’m fast enough to beat you. What do you think?”
With his hand inside his jacket, Reggie smiled at the mystery writer. Wilson was old and fat. He limped. He was going bald. Reggie smiled. Very slowly, he pulled his empty hand out of his jacket and showed it to Wilson.
“How, white man,” said Reggie in a sternly cinematic Indian voice, which caused the whole bar to break into laughter. One small battle was over. Suddenly the victor because he had shamed Wilson, Reggie triumphantly stepped out of Wilson’s way. With his hand still inside the jacket, Wilson edged toward the exit. He saw the smiling faces of the Indians as he backed out of the bar. Fawn was shaking her head. As the door closed behind him, Wilson heard the entire bar erupt into laughter.
19
Running
JOHN RAN UNTIL HE COULD barely breathe. He ran down the alleys into the dark beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct. He thought he might find safety there among the other Indians. But John could not find any Indians. He walked by the loading dock near Pioneer Square and found no Indians. From beneath the Viaduct, he peered north up toward the Union Gospel Mission and saw no Indians waiting to enter. No Indians in Occidental Park. No Indians among the homeless sleeping in cardboard houses down near the ferry docks. All the Indians had left the city and deserted John. He reeled with shock and fell to the ground. He pounded the pavement with his fists. He set his forehead against the damp cement and tried to quiet the noise in his head.
John was still prone on the ground when the 4Runner pulled up next to him. Aaron and Barry quickly climbed out of the pickup and jumped John, who curled into a fetal ball as protection. John could hear nothing now except the thud of boots against his body and the attackers’ violent exhalations of breath. There were no voices, no music, no wind or rain. He heard neither the sudden screeching of brakes nor the shouted curses when Marie pulled up in her sandwich truck and confronted the white boys who were beating him.
“Hey, hey, get away from him!” shouted Marie. She held a butter knife in her left hand.
Aaron and Barry stopped beating John long enough to look at Marie. She was a tiny Indian woman holding a butter knife, for God’s sake, and she was all alone.
“Get the fuck out of here,” threatened Aaron. Then he recognized Marie from his brother’s Native American literature class. “Oh, you fucking bitch. You’re next, you’re next.”
Barry heard something new and more dangerous in Aaron’s voice.
“You heard me,” said Marie, her voice steady and strong. “Get away from him.”
Aaron looked down at John, who was still curled into a ball. He looked back at Marie.
“Fuck you,” Aaron said and took a step toward Marie. She held the butter knife out in front of her.
“That’s all you got?” asked Aaron as he took another step closer to Marie.
Marie smiled.
“What you smiling at, bitch?”
She was still smiling when Boo opened the back door of the sandwich van and three Indian men and three Indian women stormed out. They were a ragtag bunch of homeless warriors in soiled clothes and useless shoes. But when John looked up from the ground, he saw those half-warriors attack the white boys. The Indians were weak from malnutrition and various diseases, but they kicked, scratched, and slapped with a collective rage. John wondered how those Indians could still fight after all they had been through. He had seen Indians like that before, sleeping in doorways, on heating vents outside city hall, in cardboard condominiums. He did not understand their courage, how they could keep fighting when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and fade into the pavement. The fight was quick and brutal. Two Indian men, clutching their stomachs, had fallen to the pavement. One Indian woman with a bloody mouth leaned against a car. Barry and Aaron fought their way through the remaining Indians and into their pickup.
“Get us out of here!” shouted Barry, who would notice his missing teeth later in jail. Aaron, who would notice the broken bones in his right hand when he fought the police officer who’d come to arrest him, dropped the car into gear and nearly ran over an Indian man as he careened off another car, jumped a curb, and drove away.
The Indians were celebrating their victory as Marie knelt beside John.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
John rolled over and looked up into Marie’s eyes.
“John?” She was surprised. His face was battered and bruised.
He nodded his head.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded his head.
“Hey, help me out here,” Marie called to the others. They carried John to the sandwich van and set him inside. The rest of the Indians climbed in and pulled the door shut behind them. The men were loudly celebrating, exchanging high fives and hugs. Boo, Indian-for-a-day, screamed triumphantly and pumped his fists into imaginary enemies, shadowboxing with his whole life. Marie sat in the driver’s seat, resting her head on the steering wheel. She wanted to cry. She was shocked by her anger, and how much she had wanted to hurt those white boys. Nearly blind with her own rage, she had wanted to tear out their blue eyes and blind them.
“Did you see them run?” asked Crazy Robert. “They ran like Custer, cousins, they ran like Custer.”
Joseph, holding his bruised belly in pain, laughed loudly.
“The Indians won again!” shouted King, forgetting that Indians had never won anything in the first place. The Indian men hugged one another, laughed into one another’s faces, eyes brighter and wider than they had been in years.
Boo, who had been busy punching the shadows, now sat quietly in his chair. The Indian men had forgotten he was there. Boo looked down at his hands.
Agnes and Annie were tending to Kim’s bloody mouth. Agnes held a handful of Kim’s teeth.
“Hey!” Agnes shouted. “We got to get her to a hospital!”
Her green eyes electric with pain, Kim stared up at Agnes and Annie, and tried a toothless smile.
“We did it,” said Kim.
“Did what?” asked Agnes.
There was no answer to that question.
“Marie!” shouted Annie. “We got to go!”
Marie sat up in the driver’s seat, looked back at her passengers. John had struggled to a sitting position.
“John,” said Marie. “You should lie down.”
John looked at Marie. He saw the large eyes, the long, black hair, and those crooked teeth. He noticed that her glasses were missing. Probably knocked off her face during the fight. Scratch marks across her forehead and cheeks. The glasses were probably broken, lying on the street outside, in pieces and fragments.
“John?” asked Marie, wanting to ask a question, but unsure what she wanted to know.
The other Indian men had stopped celebrating to watch John. The Indian women watched him, too. John could see his face in their faces, the large noses and cheekbones, the dark eyes and skin, the thin mouth and prominent chin, white teeth. He looked into the faces of these Indians who had saved him.
King, the failed college student, who walked the shelves of the Elliott Bay Book Company, picked out a book at random, and read a few pages a day until he finished it. Joseph, the recluse, who always wore a pair of nonprescription sunglasses, kept a hand drum hidden in the brush near the freeway, and would still sing old tribal songs. The newspaper man, Crazy Robert, who was a reporter for the Seattle Times when he was twenty-five and homeless by the time he was thirty-five. Obese in his youth, Robert had become impossibly thin. And the women. Agnes, who kept a menagerie of stray dogs and scavenger birds, spoke in whispers. Green-eyed Kim, the angry one, the nurse who had spent ten years in prison for killing an abusive husband. Annie, with black hair that once flowed down to her knees, now knotted and tangled beyond repair. She used to sing standards in a Holiday Inn Lounge in Norman, Oklahoma.
John did not know any of these Indians, could know nothing of their backgrounds. He did not know why they had fallen apart or what small thread kept them tied together now. Despite all their pain and suffering, these Indians held together, held onto one another.
John looked into the eyes of those Indians. He looked into the eyes of Boo, the white man who had been forever damaged in a war. Boo and the Indians all had the same stare, as if they spent most of their day anticipating the sudden arrival of the bullet that was meant for them. John saw the bruises and blood. And wanted to talk, to finally speak. To tell them about Father Duncan and the desert, the dreams he had of his life on a reservation, and those rare moments when he had stood on tall buildings and seen clearly. But there was no language in which he could express himself.
John saw that Marie, the sandwich lady, was crying now, tears rolling down her face. Falling to the floor of the van, they would collect and fill up the world. He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to get on his knees before her and confess all of his sins. He wanted to rest his head in her lap, feel her fingers combing through his hair, and hear her softly singing. Hush, hush, she would sing, everything will be fine in the morning. He wanted to tell her about the desert. He wanted to give her a gift for all that she had done.
“John,” said Marie, wanting him to speak. She could see him standing at the protest powwow, not wanting to owl dance, but forced into it by tradition. She could see him, with golf club in hand, standing over Wilson and the cab driver, then curled into the smallest possible version of himself as those white boys punched and kicked him. John looked at her, through her. Marie felt a sudden rush of heat. She could smell smoke. She could see an empty landscape, golden sand, blue sky, a series of footprints leading toward the horizon. She could see the dark figure of a man in the distance. He grew smaller and smaller. No matter how far or fast she ran, Marie knew that she could never catch him.
“Hey, man,” said Boo, trying to break the tension in the truck. The other Indians were silent and still.
John turned toward Boo, who could see the emptiness in the big Indian’s eyes.
“Hey, come on,” said Boo and offered John a sandwich. It was a small and ridiculous gesture.
John looked at the sandwich. He looked at the crippled white man, who had lost almost everything. He had lost his family, his home, his country, the use of his legs.
“Here,” Boo said again and held the sandwich closer to John.
“John,” said Marie, wanting John to accept Boo’s gift.
John heard Marie’s voice in the distance. He looked at the sandwich, that small offering. He closed his eyes and imagined his birth.
John hears the slight whine of machinery. He hears gunfire. Explosions. A bird cry. The machine closer now and louder. The whomp-whomp of blades as the helicopter descends. John hears it land on the pavement outside the van. John closes his eyes and sees the man in the white jumpsuit running across the pavement, holding a bundle of blankets in his arms. The white jumpsuit man wears a white helmet and visor that hides his face. Another white man and woman wait at the end of the street. They huddle together beneath a huge umbrella. The helicopter brings the rain. The man in the white jumpsuit holds the baby in his arms. Swaddled in blankets, the baby is warm and terrified. Beneath the umbrella, the man and woman wait. He is a handsome man, pale-skinned and thin. He grimaces, tries to smile, then grimaces again, awkwardly, as if the smile were somehow painful. She is a beautiful large-breasted woman with ivory skin and clear eyes. The man in the white jumpsuit runs to the man and woman beneath the umbrella, and offers them the baby swaddled in blankets. The baby is small, just days from birth, and brown-skinned, with a surprisingly full head of black hair. The white woman takes the baby and holds him to her empty breast. The baby suckles air. The white man pulls his wife closer beneath their shared umbrella. He tries to smile. The man in the white jumpsuit turns and runs back to the helicopter. He gives the pilot a thumbs-up and the chopper carefully ascends, avoiding power lines and telephone poles.
John opened his eyes and looked around the sandwich van. Everybody was quiet and still, waiting for him to speak or move. John, feeling unworthy and too ill to be healed, looked again at Boo’s small offering. Bread, blood. John could hear the helicopter floating away.
John knew that the man in the white jumpsuit was to blame for everything that had gone wrong. Everything had gone wrong from the very beginning, when John was stolen from his Indian mother. That had caused the first internal wound and John had been bleeding ever since, slowly dying and drying, until he was just a husk drifting in a desert wind. John knew who was to blame. If it had been possible, John would have reached out, lifted the visor, and seen the face of that man in the white jumpsuit. John knew he would have recognized the curve of the jaw and the arrogant expression. John had seen it before.
Once more, Boo offered the sandwich to John, who this time shook his head at that smallest kindness. There was no time for kindness. John needed to be saved and John knew exactly which white man had to die for him. He moved to the back of the truck, opened the door, and stumbled to the pavement. He did not look back, afraid of what he might see, and nobody in the truck tried to stop him. Marie watched John go away. Her skin felt hot and dry. She wondered how it felt to kill a white man.
20
Radio Silence
TRUCK SCHULTZ LISTENED TO the police radio scanner. Dozens of calls. Bar fights, domestic assaults, arson. The Seattle Urban Indian Health Center had been firebombed. Two police officers had been ambushed by rock-throwing Indians. Random gunfire. Police were looking for a truck full of white kids who were attacking homeless Indians. After he’d announced that the Indian Killer was responsible for Edward Letterman’s death, all hell had broken loose. Worse than New Year’s Eve. Worse than a full-moon Saturday night. Truck was in awe of his own power. He had to speak. He leaned toward the microphone.
“I don’t think so,” said Officer Randy Peone as he stepped into the studio. He pointed a finger at Truck. “You ain’t got nothing else to say tonight. Not one damn thing.”
21
How It Happened
OUTSIDE THE TULALIP TRIBAL Casino, David Rogers was trembling. He was alone in the dark parking lot and was terrified. He had two thousand dollars in cash in his pocket and s
uddenly felt very vulnerable. As he tried to open his car door, he dropped his keys. He bent over to pick them up and he felt a hot pain at the back of his head, saw a bright white light, and then saw nothing at all.
When he woke, David was lying facedown on the back seat of an old Chevy Nova. Two white men, Spud and Lyle, first cousins, pulled David out of the Nova and dragged him through the woods to a clearing a hundred feet off the road. Still groggy, suffering from a severe concussion, David could barely focus on the two men. He looked down at the ground and saw a solitary flower. He wondered if it was a lily. He wondered if camas root grew there. He wondered how long it had been growing.
“He’s awake,” said Lyle.
“Holy crow,” said Spud as he counted the money again. “Little bastard was rich.”
“How much?”
“A lot, I think.”
David looked up at the cousins. He tried to think clearly. He wanted to tell them something about Hemingway.
“He’s seen our faces,” said Lyle.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Spud, thinking hard.
“You think anybody saw us take him?”
“Nah, those Indians can’t see for shit.”
Lyle and Spud laughed.
“What should we do with him?” asked Lyle.
“I don’t know. I guess we should shoot him.”
David tried to get to his feet. Spud pushed him backward and David sat down hard, his back against a fallen tree.
“He’s just a kid,” said Lyle.
“A rich kid.”
“That’ll be true.”
Spud pulled out his pistol, a .38 Special, and aimed it at David’s face. Lyle covered his face. Spud’s hand was shaking. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. A startled owl lifted from a nearby tree.
“Holy crow,” said Spud. “I killed him.”
“Yeah, he looks like he’s asleep.”
“Well, what should we do now?”
“I say we get the hell out of here.”