Indian Killer
“Shit, you’re a strong one, huh?” one of the students slurred to the killer, and then tugged on the white man’s leg. “Jesus, you got wasted, huh? Shit, wake up, wake up. The party’s just starting.”
The white man groaned and shifted. The killer was surprised that the man was still alive. His blood ran down the killer’s back.
“Shit,” said the student. “Don’t you two be doing anything nasty now, huh?” Laughter. “You’re both going to be hating it in the morning. Hangover City, you’ll be hating it.”
The students laughed and staggered away. The killer watched them go, breathed deeply, and kept walking down the trail. The killer wanted to drop the body and leave it where it landed, but felt responsible for the white man. Honestly, the killer had not necessarily meant to hurt him and wanted to make sure the man was buried properly. There had to be a ceremony, a wake, silent prayers. That was how it was done. The killer had learned many ceremonies, but rarely practiced them.
The killer walked off the trail into a dark neighborhood. Silently singing an invisibility song learned from a dream, the killer carried the body to an empty house. A FOR SALE sign. Bare windows. A broken lock on the back door. The killer carried the body inside the house and gently set it on the living room floor. Kneeling beside the body, the killer cut the white man’s scalp away and stuffed the bloody souvenir into a pocket. So much blood. The killer was drenched with blood, soaking shirt, jacket, and pants. The blood was beautiful but not enough. One dead man was not enough. The killer was disappointed. Disappointment grew quickly into anger, then rage, and the killer brought the knife down into the white man’s chest again and again. Still not satiated, the killer knew there was more work to do. The dead man’s blue eyes were open and still, pupils dilated. With hands curved into talons, the killer tore the white man’s eyes from his face and swallowed them whole. The killer then pulled two white owl feathers out of another pocket, and set them on the white man’s chest. Blood soon soaked into the feathers, staining them a dark red.
6
Truck Schultz
“HELLO OUT THERE, FOLKS, this is Truck Schultz on KWIZ, the Voice of Reason, and boy, do I have a problem!”
Schultz sat in the radio station, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee. A tall, muscular white man with a receding hairline, blue eyes, and large ears, he was the host of the most popular talk-radio show in the city and was ready to go national, sure that he would be more popular than Rush Limbaugh. Truck had started with a late-night jazz show on KWIZ a few years earlier. Not long after conservative radio hit it big, KWIZ changed its format to talk and Truck became a star. His promotional billboards were everywhere: KEEP ON TRUCKIN’! Now Truck had a hundred thousand listeners and a drive-time slot. He never played jazz anymore. Leaning close to his microphone, Truck exhaled a cloud of thick, gray smoke and spoke loudly and clearly.
“Through my sources in the Seattle Police Department, I’ve just learned that the body of a white man was discovered in a house in Fremont early this morning. My sources say that the man was scalped and ritually mutilated. That’s right, folks. Scalped and ritually mutilated. My sources say certain evidence makes it clear that an American Indian might be responsible for this crime. My sources would not reveal what that evidence was, but they did make it clear that only an Indian, or a person intimately familiar with Indian culture, would know to leave such evidence behind. What do you think, folks? Give me a call.”
7
Introduction to Native American Literature
A FEW DAYS AFTER she met John Smith at the protest powwow, Marie Polatkin walked into the evening section of the Introduction to Native American Literature class for the first time. The professor had not yet arrived. The students were gossiping about the dead body that had been discovered in an empty house in Fremont.
“Yeah,” said one older white woman. “I read he was scalped.”
“Yeah,” said a white man. “Like an Indian would do it.”
“An Indian?”
“Yeah, Indians started that whole scalping business.”
“Oh, that’s spooky. And here we are, in an Indian class. I just got the shivers.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Marie said as she sat at a desk near the front. “The French were the first to scalp people in this country. Indians just copied them.”
The white students all stared at Marie, saw that she was Indian, and then turned back to their conversation.
“I bet it was one of those serial killers,” said another white woman.
“Yes,” said a third white woman. “There’s something in the water here. I mean, we’ve got the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, the I-5 Killer. We, like, raise them here or something.”
Marie tried to ignore the morbid discussion. She was more concerned about the professor. She’d signed up for the class because she’d heard that Dr. Clarence Mather, the white professor, supposedly loved Indians, or perhaps his idea of Indians, and gave them good grades. But he was also a Wannabe Indian, a white man who wanted to be Indian, and Marie wanted to challenge Mather’s role as the official dispenser of “Indian education” at the University.
“He always wants to sweat with Indian students, or share the peace pipe, or sit at a drum and sing,” Binky, a Yakama woman, had said. “He’s kind of icky. He really fawns over the women, you know what I mean? Real Indian lover, that one.”
Still, in spite of and because of Dr. Mather, Marie assumed she’d be one of many Indians in the class, all looking for an easy grade. But she’d been wrong in her assumptions. She was the only Indian in the class. When Mather walked into the class, he was wearing a turquoise bolo tie, and his gray hair was tied back in a ponytail.
While Marie was surprised by the demographics of the class, she was completely shocked by the course reading list. One of the books, The Education of Little Tree, was supposedly written by a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter. But Forrest Carter was actually the pseudonym for a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Three of the other books, Black Elk Speaks, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, and Lakota Woman, were taught in almost every Native American Literature class in the country, and purported to be autobiographical, though all three were co-written by white men. Black Elk himself had disavowed his autobiography, a fact that was conveniently omitted in any discussion of the book. The other seven books included three anthologies of traditional Indian stories edited by white men, two nonfiction studies of Indian spirituality written by white women, a book of traditional Indian poetry translations edited by a Polish-American Jewish man, and an Indian murder mystery written by some local white writer named Jack Wilson, who claimed he was a Shilshomish Indian. On the recommendation of a white classmate, Marie had read one of Wilson’s novels a few months before the class. She’d hated the book and seriously doubted that its author was Indian, or much of a writer. She’d done some research on his background and found a lot of inconsistencies.
After seeing the reading list, Marie knew that Dr. Mather was full of shit.
“Excuse me, Dr. Mather,” Marie said. “You’ve got this Little Tree book on your list. Don’t you know it’s a total fraud?”
“I’m aware that the origins of the book have been called into question,” said Mather. “But I hardly believe that matters. The Education of Little Tree is a beautiful and touching book. If those rumors about Forrest Carter are true, perhaps we can learn there are beautiful things inside of everybody.”
“Yeah, well, whatever was inside that man, it wasn’t Cherokee blood.” Marie’s voice grew louder. “And there are only three Indians on this list, and their books were really written by white guys. Not exactly traditional or autobiographical. I mean, I think there’s a whole lot more biography than auto in those books. And there aren’t any Northwest Indian writers at all.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Mather said. “And your name is?”
“Marie. Marie Polatkin.”
“By your appearance, Ms. Polatkin, I assume you’re Native American.”
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“I’m Spokane.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Mather said. “I taught a Spokane named Reggie Polatkin. A relative of yours?”
“My cousin,” said Marie suspiciously. She knew Reggie and Mather had been close at one time. But Reggie had been expelled from the University after assaulting Mather for reasons that were never clear. While Marie recognized that Mather was a pompous jerk, she also knew that Reggie was no saint. In fact, he’d been involved in more than a few fistfights in his life. And after he’d been expelled, Reggie had simply disappeared. No member of their family had heard from him in over a year. Marie didn’t want Mather to give her a poor grade simply because she was related to her crazy cousin. If she was going to get a poor grade, she wanted to receive it because of her own craziness.
“I trust you are aware that Reggie and I had, well, let’s say it was an academic conflict.”
“Yeah,” said Marie.
“Well,” said Mather with a smile. “I hope you don’t hold a familial grudge against me, Ms. Polatkin?”
“Reggie is Reggie. I’m me.”
“Fine, fine. Now, let’s see, where were we? Ah, yes. The Spokane Indians. Columbia Plateau, Interior Salish, closely related to the Colville, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, and others. A salmon tribe whose reservation is bordered by the Columbia River to the north, the Spokane River to the south, and Chimakum Creek to the east. A veritable island of a reservation, is it not?”
“I guess,” said Marie.
“Well, Ms. Polatkin, I understand your concerns. But I must correct your math. We do have four Native American authors in this course. Mr. Black Elk, Mr. Lame Deer, and Ms. Crow Dog did have help transcribing their stories, but many people use professionals to help write their books. And Mr. Wilson, as you can see by the syllabus, is a Shilshomish Indian, which, unless I’m mistaken, is a Northwest tribe.
“You see, Ms. Polatkin, I envision this course as a comprehensive one, viewing the Native American world from both the interior and exterior. One would hope that we can all benefit from a close reading of the assigned texts, and recognize the validity of a Native American literature that is shaped by both Indian and white hands. In order to see that this premise is verifiable, we need only acknowledge that the imagination has no limits. That, in fact, to paraphrase Whitman, ‘Every good story that belongs to Indians belongs to non-Indians, too.’”
Mather dismissed any further questions with a slight nod of his head, and proceeded to launch into a detailed lecture about the long tradition of European-Americans who were adopted into Indian tribes. A red-headed, green-eyed Irish and British mix, Mather proudly revealed that he’d been adopted into a Lakota Sioux family, an example of the modern extension of that long tradition.
“Dr. Mather,” Marie said. “What about the long tradition of white guys who were killed by Indians? How about the white guy they found dead in Fremont? Can we talk about him, too? How about the modern extension of that long tradition?”
“Ms. Polatkin, I hardly see how the murder of one poor man has anything to do with the study of Native American literature.”
Dr. Mather tried to ignore Marie, but she felt compelled to challenge him and constantly interrupted his first lecture. She was enjoying herself. She’d found an emotional outlet in the opportunity to harass a white professor who thought he knew what it meant to be Indian. For Marie, being Indian was mostly about survival, and she’d been fighting so hard for her survival that she didn’t know if she could stop. She needed conflict and, in those situations where conflict was absent, she would do her best to create it. Of course, conflict with whites didn’t need much creating. Her struggle with Dr. Mather, which started out as intellectual sparring, became personal, and intensified as that first class hour went along.
David Rogers, who had taken the class because of a specific sense of guilt and a vague curiosity, was fascinated by Marie. She seemed exotic and impossibly bold, speaking to a college professor with such disdain and disrespect. He had never known any woman who behaved in such a manner. David’s mother had died when he was five years old, so he had only vague and completely pleasant memories of her. And most of the white girls in his hometown had been quietly conservative and unfailingly polite. David had not bothered to approach those few hometown white girls who had been even slightly rebellious. And he had never spoken to an Indian woman.
David had grown up on a farm near Marie’s reservation. Throughout his life, his only real contact with Indians happened in the middle of the night when reservation Spokanes crept onto his family’s farm to steal camas root, the spongy, pungent bulbs of indigenous lilies that had been a traditional and sacred food of the local Indians for thousands of years. The Spokanes arrived in the middle of the night because David’s father, Buck, refused to allow them to gather camas, even though it grew on a few acres of their otherwise useless land.
On one particular night when he was twelve years old, David Rogers had been sitting for hours in the family hunting blind with his older brother Aaron and their father, Buck. Twenty feet off the ground, the blind, camouflaged by leaves and sod, had stretched between trees in a stand of windbreak pines. Ordinarily, the blind was used to hunt for the deer that often wandered through the open fields of the Rogers family farm. That night, however, Buck Rogers and his sons had been waiting for the Indians who came to steal camas root.
“Is that weapon clean?” Buck Rogers had asked Aaron.
“Yes, sir,” Aaron had said and had given a smart salute. Though only a year older than David, Aaron had been much more experienced with weapons and held a vintage AK-47, semi-automatic, a full clip.
“How about yours?” Buck had asked David.
David had looked down at the small twenty-two-caliber rifle in his hands. Wood stock, metal trigger, smell of gunpowder. He’d looked back at his father and older brother.
“It’s ready, sir,” David had said, his voice breaking a little. He’d been scared.
Buck had heard the fear in his youngest son’s voice. David had always been a strange one, and if left to himself, would have spent all of his time reading. Buck loved David, but thought he was probably queer. Buck had always known that Aaron Rogers was a whole different animal. He had been staring out into the camas fields, waiting for the Indians to appear. Wanting the Indians to appear.
“You see anything?” Buck had asked.
“No, sir,” Aaron had said.
David had peered out of the blind. The fields brightly illuminated by the moon. Fallow fields reaching north to south. To the west, a dirt access road. David had swallowed hard when he saw the car, without headlights, appear over the horizon.
“There,” Aaron had said, surprised by his own giddiness. He’d wondered if this was how the great Indian-fighters, like Custer, Sheridan, and Wright, had felt just before battle.
“Oh, we got them now,” Buck had said. “We got them good.”
The car had rattled down the access road and stopped beside a camas field. The engine had idled for a few moments before shuddering to a stop. Slowly and quietly, five, six, seven Indians had crawled out of the car. David had not understood how seven people could have fit into that small car. Four children, David saw, and a man and woman, perhaps the mother and father of the children, and, following behind them, an elderly woman.
“Tell me when, tell me when,” Aaron had whispered to his father.
“Patience, patience.”
The Indians had walked across the field until they were standing less than fifty feet away from the hunting blind. With his finger lightly feathering the trigger, Aaron had stared down the barrel of his rifle and sighted in on the Indian father.
“When? When?” Aaron had asked.
David had watched as the Indians, even the children, pulled out strange curved tools and began digging in the earth. Digging for camas root. David had wondered why the Indians loved the root so much. Why had they come in the middle of the night? After Buck had threatened them with physical violence? Even the
Indian children, who David had always seen as wild and uncontrollable, quietly and respectfully dug for those roots. David had no idea the Indians had been root digging for thousands of years.
“Get ready,” Buck had whispered. David, knowing what was expected of him, had reluctantly raised his rifle.
“They’re just kids,” David had whispered.
“Lice make nits,” Buck had whispered as he raised his rifle.
The Indians dug for roots. As the old woman dug, she’d remembered when she had come here with her grandmother.
“Remember,” Buck had whispered. “Shoot over their heads.”
David had aimed his rifle at the moon, not wanting to even see the Indians as they ran away. He’d heard the soft laughter of the Indian mother. David had wondered if she was beautiful.
“Now,” Buck had said and pulled the trigger. David had squeezed off a bullet and then had turned to look at his brother, who had not yet fired. David had seen the look in his older brother’s eyes and had known Aaron was sighting in on the Indian father. Not above his head, but at his head.
“No!” David had shouted as Aaron pulled the trigger. The Indian man had fallen to the ground. He didn’t move for a brief moment, long enough for David to cry out, but then the Indian man had jumped to his feet and, apparently unharmed, raced to the car. As the Indians drove away, Aaron and Buck had laughed and whooped loudly.
“You tried to shoot him,” David had accused his brother.
“What are you talking about?” Aaron had asked.
“You aimed at him. You tried to kill him.”
Buck had stared at his sons with recognition and love. Aaron, who had always wanted so much to be like his father that he wore the same shirts. And David, who had been scared of everything, but would fight Aaron for the slightest transgression.